Crash Club - Drive & Smash City review
:: CRASH.IOPrice: Free
Version: 1.1.1
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2
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The easiest way to describe Crash Club - Drive & Smash City is to call it Slither.io-meets-Twisted Metal. The game is a colorful multiplayer game full of cars trying to destroy each other, all while crashing into everything all over a virtual city. This makes for some good, light fun, but nothing that you'll stick with for very long.
Car combat
Every game of Crash Club tosses players into the same virtual city, where the only goal is to survive long enough to score lots of points. Points are most easily scored by crashing into objects like bushes, fences, water towers, picnic tables, etc. Players can also earn points by destroying other players, which is where Crash Club gets interesting.
When you first enter a match, your car is armed with nothing to protect itself, so your only recourse is to crash into things. Occasionally, crashing into things allows you gather tokens, which can be redeemed at garages for weapons and power ups. This then allows you to attack other players and defend yourself from others.
Car.io
One thing to note about Crash Club is that it's structure is more akin to Slither.io than it is a more traditional multiplayer game. When you join a match, it is one that has likely been in progress for a while, and your time in that match ends when your car gets destroyed. It's a simple system that makes jumping in and out of the game pretty simple.
Crash Club's controls also avoid over-complicating things. You can steer your car by swiping anywhere on the screen, and the cars chug ahead slowly enough on their own that maneuvering through even the tightest spaces is super easy. Once you get weapons, attacking enemies involves just tapping on your target to fire away.
Driving you mad
Crash Club's car-combat take on Slither.io is mostly successful, but there are some things about it that aren't so great. The most frustrating thing about the game is definitely the randomness of token collection. Crashing into anything at any time in the game may yield a token, but it also may not. Without tokens, Crash Club leaves you pretty defenseless against your enemies, and I found that it's not too hard to get into situations where you crash around for minutes at a time only to be left tokenless.
The other kind of annoying thing about Crash Club is its car upgrade structure. As you play the game, you gather gems, which can unlock cars using a kind of gacha-style mechanic. The only thing is, some of the cars you can unlock are simply better than the ones you start out with. This is a problem both because it makes Crash Club's mulitplayer inherently unbalanced in favor of those who get lucky or spend money and keeps you from playing cars you may have liked the design of.
The bottom line
Crash Club offers some light multiplayer action that is reminiscent of Twisted Metal, albeit in a much more colorful way. It's a game formula that works, but only when it's firing on all cylinders. When the game's randomness isn't working in your favor though, there long stretches of playing that aren't fun. This isn't enough to make Crash Club a bad game, but it is enough to keep me from playing much more of it moving forward.