Supraland: Crash

A new campaign in the Supraland universe! Unfortunately, it is not as fun as the main game, and can often be quite frustrating. Still, hardcore fans are sure to enjoy it.

First, the good: the story is terrific! Let's face it, the main game did not have much of a story. You could even say that the story was just a MacGuffin to keep the game moving along (see what I did here?). Crash by contrast has a delightfully wacky story, fun and memorable characters, and hilarious plot twists. It just goes to show that the developers can pump out a good story if they decide to.

Now for the bad. This DLC is much more difficult than the main game. But the difficulty is not only due to the puzzles themselves, which are mostly great, but rather to their presentation. The main game was fairly linear in that for the most part you moved from one self-contained puzzle area to the next one. Crash, however, has just a few sprawling areas packed with puzzles, most of which you have no chance of solving yet. So you'll be constantly moving back and forth and trying to solve ten puzzles at once without having any idea which ones are possible and which specific one will move you forward in the game. It seems like a rather heavy-handed way to make the game more "difficult". This could have been solved with better cues as to what you're supposed to be focusing on. Instead, the cues are very, very general, if they even exist.

Also, though Crash thankfully has much less combat than the main game, it has far, far too much precision and time-based platforming. Does anyone actually enjoy 3D platforming? Very, very few games have done this right, and Supraland's floaty-boaty controls pretty much guarantee a frustrating experience. There were a few times where I had to perform multiple precise jumps fast and in succession and failed, had to go back, failed again, and again, and again. The urge to rage quit was strong.

And when I said that the puzzles are great, there are exceptions. At least one is awful, as all the visual cues defy the logic of the solution. The purple pipe puzzle: the two connecting pipe ends are sealed, which in all other puzzles prevents objects from moving through them. I spent an hour trying to find a way to remove the seals and thinking that I needed to discover something else first.

The negatives are serious and are sure to be turn-offs for many players. I'm recommending this DLC because I did enjoy it despite the frustrations, but only to hardcore fans.

Oh, in case it wasn't obvious: forget about playing this without completing the main game first. Crash relies on a lot of preexisting knowledge of what your tools can do.