Crashlands is a surprisingly deep action game with a huge emphasis on survival and crafting. You begin the game hurtling through space trying to deliver a package, when you’re ship encounters a powerful being that harvests a vital component from your ship for their own needs, which in turn causes your ship to crash. Upon arriving on your randomly generated planet, you and your floating robot companion, Juicebox, must use your limited resources to forage the immediate area for other resources, which can then be used to make tools, weapons, and armor that allow you to harvest and ever progressing line of resources that can be used to find more and more resources.
Along the way, you will encounter many of the planet’s native denizens, most of which are hostile to you (but provide necessary ingredients), others are helpful in that they give quests and don’t actively try to harm you. They will also point you in the right direction to go to figure out the mystery of the being that broke apart your ship and maybe figure out a way off of this planet. While the characters and their predicaments are entertaining and provide some nice meat to the game, you can really just ignore most of the finer details and focus on gathering resources and crafting what you need.
Crashlands uses a charming and bright 2d art style and utilizes fun animations that call to mind paper cut dolls with brads for joints. While you will start off being able to gather grass and other vegetation using your bare hands, you’ll quickly gain the ability to make various tools to be used in chopping down or breaking apart other objects. As you make your way through the sizable map, you will run across harder and harder materials which will require upgraded tools. Bigger and stronger monsters will also make an appearance, so bigger and stronger weapons, and armor will be necessary to craft during your time spent in the Crashlands. Through crafting our gear and weaponry, we upgrade our stats in a manner akin to roleplaying games, but there aren’t any skill trees or other character customization options.
Crashlands has smooth, intuitive controls. You perform most of your actions using the A button, but can hotkey other items to the x, b, y, and ZL buttons. ZR is healing items by default, and I personally found that to be the most natural feeling. Other hotkey buttons seemed unnecessary since you will pull up the appropriate tool/weapon when you begin to attack or harvest. The direction buttons (starting from left and working clockwise) pull up your quest log/info tab, crafting menu, map, and character inventory/stats. Plus button pulls up the menu (save progress, exit, etc), and minus does nothing. L and R cycle through available targets, and sometimes you will auto target a resource during combat, which can be troublesome.
Combat is fairly straightforward- learn the enemy attack patterns and learn to avoid them while dealing as much damage as possible. As mentioned above, combat can sometimes be frustrating in an area where there are a lot of resources around because you will sometimes auto target them as you get them near them, and they will also be in the cycle if you’re currently trying to switch between two hostile creatures. It’s fairly easy to dodge enemies and shake their engagement so that you can harvest around them to clear an area, but this isn’t as easy to do with some of the more powerful enemies that can be faster and/or stronger. Enemies often group up, as well, which can leave you in a situation where you will be dodging and attacking 2-4 enemies in one area. This makes it easier to harvest a lot of items at once when you do manage to kill them, but you may die more quickly, as well.
When you die, your recent items will be scattered around a tombstone that is marked on your map. You will then respawn at your home point (which can be set at any time during the game by going to your map), and once you make it back to the tombstone, can gather your things. You can set a lot of points of interest as your home, and since it can be done on the fly it’s recommended that you set a nearby telepad as your home base when you’re getting ready to fight a particularly nasty creature to make recovery easier. Unfortunately, your enemy’s health will refill when you respawn, so it’s always a fresh start.
Crashlands is a very engaging survival action game. I was skeptical about it at first when I saw that it was a mobile game, but the depth and substance are much more akin to a full console experience with the convenience of pick up and play game style and progression. I recommend it to everyone that enjoys action survival games.
