Crashlands

Butterscotch Shenanigans are some pretty cool devs. Quadropus Rampage I still stand by that is one of the best Android titles, a roguelite game with a very generous F2P model that makes the game essentially free. The number of hours I've spent on that game, I don't even want to count. Even years later when coming back, it's still as fun and it never gets old to kick some ass with your Octopus.

Anyway Crashlands was in the works for some time, if you've followed them they talked about it for a while and it was finally released earlier this year. This one is a paid title however, which kinda surprised me. Anyway I scooped up the 8 or so dollars from my google rewards and into this game I was about to jump in... and that was 2 months ago. I'm really impressed with the amount of content in the game, and if you are hesitant about the generally high price of the game (compared to other mobile titles), it's really worth it and it took me 36 hours to complete the game.

Unlike their 2 previous games, it's not a Roguelite and throws away the Binding of Isaac influences altogether. Crashlands is more in the realms of an action RPG, where harvesting resources is very important in order to craft better gear and gadgets. I guess you can say that the game goes in a repetitive cycle where you harvest enough things to build the next crafting machine, which unlocks a bunch of new things and let's you advance further into the game. The game works in a semi-open world where you have main and side quests to do, so you do have some sort of freedom to do what you want. I do not know if the maps have any actual limits, it seems that they are endless as you can go on and on exploring and I've never seen the end of it (although the quests are all given around the center, which is still a pretty large area). The game is split into 3 areas, all with increasing difficulties.

I think the game might not be for everyone due to its repetitive nature, but I actually didn't mind it at all and was having fun til the very end. The story is a little silly, but that goes right in with the devs previous games which I always felt were Earthbound influences with their style of humor. Mind you I didn't find it as funny as Quadropus Rampage, but that didn't retract from the game at all. I would easily recommend this one, for all you grinding RPG fans out there, the control scheme on my Android tablet really worked perfectly (aside from the rougher boss battles where you trying to dodge and switch gadget at the same time), but all around really no problem there and I would imagine that it would work just as well with mouse and keyboard for the Steam version.