Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Sleeper Hit, June 10, 2007
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
This is a game you're unfortunately unlikely to buy. Since you're here, though, let me tell you why you should.
It's reviewed pretty well, and has a really great central concept - smashing a 3-D world into 2-D to solve some puzzles. I remember back when I heard the concept, my first reaction was, "WHOA! That's AWESOME!" and my second was, "Man... it's gonna be really hard to actually make compelling puzzles based on that premise."
I'm actually really happy to say that it's much more the former than the latter. Basically, you're an insomniac who's gone to a doctor who has this machine, called "CRUSH" for whatever reason, which he's using to explore your psyche. Think a dash of Psychonauts. Well, turns out you've lost your marbles, and now have to find them. To do so, you've got to run around these little 3-D worlds, gathering up enough marbles to trigger the exit.
Essentially, you control the camera with the D-Pad - you can rotate it 90 degrees with a tap to the left or the right, and up gives you a top down view. L "crushes" the environment into 2-D.
The game's puzzles rely on the fact that certain blocks are passable in 2-D, but not in 3-D, and that distances in the third dimension "crush" to zero in 2-D. Zoe Mode has built a lot of puzzles out of a relatively small number of basic building blocks. Rolling balls, cylinders, and such behave like you do in the 2-D/3-D squish, and so rolling balls into certain obstacles, or rolling them on one axis, rotating the world and re-crushing now puts the ball in a totally different place.
It's really interesting, surprisingly well-written, and fun. The art style's not for everyone, and the gameplay can be surprisingly cerebral while never feeling tiresome. Frustrating at times, perhaps, but definitely not tiresome. This isn't the kind of game where you think, "I've done this a thousand times before." This is the kind of game that's really going to get overlooked mainly because it came out for the PSP. If this had been Mario-branded, and sold on the DS, it'd be hailed as a benchmark of how innovative Nintendo is.
Kudos to the folks at Zoe Mode - they've really pulled a rabbit out of their hat.
If you've got a PSP, you should definitely pick this up.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Game of the Year Candidate, December 2, 2007
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
A puzzle game for Game of the Year? on the PSP? You're right; it's not a concept that I would have bought before I played Crush.
Portable games have a difficult road to walk. Most people play them in short bursts, and they also have to work on limited hardware and smaller screens. Hence, they run the danger of either A) providing only repetitive/simplistic gameplay or B) getting too complicated to best accomodate limited play time and screen size. There's a narrow zone between the two, and Crush straddles it flawlessly.
The star of Crush is the level design. Mario doesn't have anything on Crush. Each level provides a very carefully constructed puzzle around the central concept of "crushing". The player can manipulate the camera and then crush the level to 2D from that vantage point. Add on top of that a number of interactive items like switches, balls, and collectible items and *voila*- you have a puzzle game.
As hard as it is to solve some puzzles, the tougher job is creating them. You'll feel genuinely accomplished when you finish the level (especially if you go for the extras), but you have to wonder just how brilliant the developers are to create such tight, intriguing puzzles. It might seem that the crush concept would get old over the span of 40 levels, but it always seems like there's some new application of the ideas at work.
Buttressing the solid gameplay is a fun soundtrack, polished presentation, and a quirky story featuring full voiceovers.
Finally, there's a challenging "trophy mode" to try for those ambitious enough to go after the extra items.
Crush doesn't have the bombast of a Heavenly Sword or the legion of drooling fans that a Zelda title commands. But for what it sets out to do- provide innovative and compelling puzzle designs surrounded by pleasing aesthetics- it's nearly perfect.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect game for handheld play!, June 20, 2007
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
Let me start this by saying I'm not real big on puzzle-type games. But I have to say this game is just amazing. I don't even like to call this game a puzzle game but I guess in reality it is. The images/graphics are very strange and dream like (very much to my liking). The main character is suffering from insomnia and the premise being that the puzzles (the source of which are a wacky helmet device called crush) are going to cure him given enough time.
The story line is interesting, the voices are done well and the game itself is very different. The puzzles are solved by crushing the 3D world into 2D via different camera angles. So in order to move from one ledge to a distant ledge, you could switch the camera into the forward looking view and then crush into 2D - the ledge would then be accessible. While this starts off very easy it scales up to more difficult "puzzles" which require thought and creativity.
This game is an absolute MUST own for anyone who has a PSP. It is just about guaranteed to pass hours away like minutes! It's perfect for handheld play in that its an easy game to pick up and run with (while the puzzles/boards will scale up and become much more difficult, the game mechanics on their own are easy to learn and a ton of fun to play).
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