Introduction

Crop Crusaders is out now on Steam! The game is a classic 2D platformer with a culinary twist: there are six vegetable characters for you to choose from, all with their own unique abilities! Cycle through them to solve puzzles, beat up enemies, and soar past obstacles as you escape from the Tormenting Lab and its many Micro-Verses!

I LOVE the concept of switching between characters with different abilities! For example, the carrot guy can see in the dark because, y'know, eating carrots is supposed to help your eyes, and the pepper guy can breathe fire to melt ice and damage enemies!

Unfortunately, in practice, the game is riddled with bugs and bad design that make it not a very enjoyable experience. In this review, I'll share my experience playing Crop Crusaders and give my opinions on how I think the game can be improved.

Gameplay

You start the game as Broccoli, but as you progress, you unlock five other veggies. Here's what they do:

1. Broccoli - has a grappling hook
2. Carrot - can dash and temporarily see in the dark
3. Cucumber - can dive into sand to move quickly and avoid enemies
4. Tomato - can climb vines
5. Pepper - can breathe fire that melts ice and damages enemies
6. Eggplant - is strong enough to smash stones and break boulders

I like that some of the veggies' abilities are related to their real-life counterparts, such as the previously-mentioned carrot and pepper, but others just felt arbitrary. How come Eggplant is strong enough to break through rocks? I feel like a bigger, heavier vegetable like a pumpkin or squash would fit better. And what do cucumbers have to do with diving into sand? They don't even grow underground like how potatoes, onions, beets, and other vegetables do!

Besides their special abilities, all veggies control the same. You jump high and walk fast. There's no running, so you always go at top speed, which feels pretty bad when combined with tiny platforms, pixel-perfect jumps, and numerous leaps of faith. Seriously, look at the screenshots below. They were all taken within the first FIVE MINUTES!

The game is tagged "Precision Platformer" on Steam, but it doesn't feel fair in the same way that games like Celeste do, it feels more like random chance if I'll get past a particular section or not. Case in point: the wall jump.

All veggies can perform the wall jump, but I don't know if I'm doing it wrong or the code is just messed up, but it only works half of the time! Sometimes after wall jumping you'll just freeze in place midair, unable to move left or right, until you fall to your doom. Because of this, it took me over 20 minutes to get past one section in the second level that required multiple successful wall jumps above a bottomless pit.

One another annoyance I discovered comes later in the game when you unlock the ability to switch between veggies on the fly. For some reason, when you die, you revert back to the veggie that was selected when the section began. That means, for example, if I need Broccoli for a specific jump, but I keep messing up and dying, each time I'll spawn back as Carrot, for example, and have to manually switch back to Broccoli before I can progress! It may sound like a small thing, but in a game like this where you're probably dying 50+ times per stage, the frustration adds up fast. It would be so simple to just make it to where you respawn as the veggie you were when you died!

The developers really need to take the time to polish up the controls and fix all of the annoying bugs. It's a platformer game, movement is literally the core mechanic! With a more refined moveset, I'd feel like I actually have control over the characters, and I would enjoy jumping through the levels a lot more.

Art

I like the art of Crop Crusaders! It isn't phenomenal, but it certainly isn't ugly either! I think the character designs of the veggies especially are cute and charming. However, there are bugs with several animations in the game, most notably when jumping against a wall. It seems like the game doesn't know what to do and just keeps flipping from the wall slide animation to the jump animation over and over and over until you land!

Other than that, I would've liked a bigger focus on food or vegetables in the art style. After all, the game is literally named CROP Crusaders, yet the locations you visit are a sewer, a forest, a snowy cave, and a desert. None of those really scream "vegetables" to me, except maybe the forest? It would've been cool to platform across a kitchen, for example, and dodge knives, pots, pans, ovens, boiling water, etc. It just doesn't seem very thematically consistent for vegetables to be fighting against a giant computer boss or a giant slime boss.

Nonetheless, I think the art style is more than fine and is definitely one of the highlights of the game!

Audio

Crop Crusaders has a full original soundtrack that's also available to stream on Youtube! I'm a fan of the songs. they're upbeat, groovy, and strangely do give off that "angry vegetable" vibe, though I can't exactly explain why. My favorite song was "Okra," which plays during the boss battle with the Colossal Slime.

The game's sound effects do just fine, but there's not NEARLY enough of them! How come dashing and sliding don't get sounds? Those are pretty important moves, so the player should get some feedback after using them. Jumping and walking DO have sounds, but I didn't even know they existed until I turned the music all way down and listened carefully; they're too quiet!

Like with the gameplay, a lot more polish is needed here with the sound effects.

Replay Value

Simply put, there is no replay value, as there is no way to replay levels that you've previously completed, either through a world map or a simple menu. You can choose to start from a specific level when creating a new file, but why should starting all over again be necessary to just replay levels?

The game even includes a speedrun timer, so why not just take the tiny extra step to let people replay levels so they can at least try to beat their best times? Even cooler would be an online leaderboard system where you could compete against your friends and the world! Another idea that came to mind while writing was a death counter, similar to the attempts counter in Geometry Dash. This addition would encourage players to go back and try to perfect every jump, dash, slide, and wall jump to flawlessly beat the level. You could even gamify the death counter like with my idea for the leaderboard system, where you compete to beat levels while dying the least amount of times!

Replay value is even more critical in a game like Crop Crusaders because there are only four main levels! The entire game can be beaten in under an hour if you really set your mind to it, so there's gotta be more substance to keep players engaged after the final boss.

Other Notes

I have three major annoyances for this section. The first is the speedrun timer setting, which is a complete LIE! In the settings menu, there is a checkbox on whether or not you want the speedrun timer to be displayed. I checked the checkbox, but was confused when no timer appeared. Turns out, this setting doesn't actually do anything! Upon creating a new save file, after entering your name, you're prompted on whether you want to enable the speedrun timer or not. If you choose no, the speedrun timer will NEVER appear for the entire playthrough, even if you go back into settings and try turning it on! This means if you ever want the speedrun timer to appear, you have to create a new save file and start all over again! This behavior makes literally no sense and needs to be fixed. 

My second issue is that the settings in the settings menu DON'T SAVE! That means every single time you boot up the game, you have to re-configure everything. It would be so simple to just save all the settings variables to a json file and re-apply them when the game starts. It isn't too big of a deal now, since the menu is tiny, but I could only imagine how much of a nightmare it would be for players if they had to reset all of their custom keybinds, for example, each time they wanted to play the game. (speaking of which, the ability to add custom keybinds is a great quality-of-life feature that really should've been included)

My third issue is again with the settings menu. This is just a simple bug, so it'll probably be fixed soon anyway, but when you pause the game and then unpause it, for whatever reason, the game won't actually let you pause again until you move your character! This really confused me the first time it happened.

Conclusion

I think Crop Crusaders is a game with a ton of potential. The core mechanic of swapping between different veggies to utilize their unique abilities brings a lot of cool new possibilities to the table. Unfortunately, the game is weighed down by numerous bugs, confusing design choices, visual glitches, and poor controls that make it frankly pretty annoying to play. All of my problems with the game could be fixed with a single mega-update, so I'm excited to see what Hobgoblin Games has in store for us next! With just a little bit of water and sunlight, Crop Crusaders could grow into something truly special.