Combo Crew hands-on

It’s a little past mid-afternoon and you’re probably feeling full from scarfing down some serious lunch goodness, but before you head back to work, you have this urge to pass the time with a game of some kind. Well, if you have a soft spot for beat’em up games of long ago, like Final Fight or Streets of Rage, then you might find solace in Combo Crew – an action-brawler that pits your character against an onslaught of enemies. Actually, it reminds us most of the arcade game Pit Fighter, since you control a character while fending off hordes of bad guys in a single arena.

Unlike those aforementioned nostalgic games, Combo Crew has been developed for the modern times – well, it’s optimized for touch interaction, obviously. Rather than finding on-scree controls that can clutter things up when the action gets heated, we’re able to control our fighter via swipe movements. As much as we love swiping like madness over our enemies, the controls aren’t always intuitive, which is more prevalent when there are many enemies on screen. Still, it’s a simple execution with minimal complexity for other moves. In addition to starting an attack by swiping on an enemy, there’s also a charging attack that’s used to cut down that enemies block our attacks, which is accomplished by doing a long press. Additionally, there’s the combo starter swipe move, which activates by swiping with two fingers.

Visually, the 2D presentation of the game works rather well, especially when the animations are all smooth and eye-candified. On top of that, seeing that each of the characters have their own fighting techniques, the developers throw in some humor into the action by incorporating unconventional fighting movements into each of them. Lastly, if you’re more about social gameplay, Combo Crew features a multi-player aspect as well, by allowing you to rescue your friends in their game, or vice versa. Something we don’t see too often, the multi-player aspect is asynchronous across devices and platforms – so you can play with both your Android and iOS trotting friends.

At $1.99 for both iOS and Android versions, it’ll be worth it if you’re into this kind of gameplay, but it can become repetitive playing it solo, even with the extra moves, new characters, and power-ups. Well, that’s unless you can get your friends to get in on the action. Still, it would’ve been nice to see this using the freemium model instead.



source: iTunes & Google Play