I'm sorry, cute little crow that the player controls in Crow Story. Maybe best to avert your eyes from this review...
This game feels very amateur in its production. The world is a jumble of low-poly shapes and patterns but, unlike something like Toree or Toree 2, Crow Story makes no attempt to fold this blockiness into its own aesthetic, and the game just comes off as simultaneously ugly and extremely sparse. The sound design is very poor; the only things that seem to have any foley are your footsteps and wingflaps; this is especially noticeable in the extremely simplistic cutscenes, when something like a huge door creaking open will just happen in surreal silence. The music... honestly the music is decent, no real complaints there.
But even worse than the aesthetic roughness, I think, is the level design. This game puts me in mind of random community levels on LittleBigPlanet back in the day, where some overeager young mind would think of a bunch of genuinely somewhat interesting platforming set pieces, and just throw them all together with no sense of structure, flow, progression or balance. Seriously the difficulty curve in this game is all over the shop; it goes from ultra-basic jump spacing to kaizo-level spinning firebar nonsense and back again seemingly at random. There were a few parts where I genuinely had no idea where I was supposed to go and just had to try random things for a few minutes until I managed to fling myself onto the next platform, whether that was the intended route or not. A lot of the time I think the strategy was supposed to revolve around platforming tricks that don't even make any sense and are never taught. As soon as I learned that wall-jumping, turning 180 in-air and then diving forward gave you a height boost, a lot more platforms became accessible; methinks the dev has been picking up tricks from some Mario Odyssey speedruns...
So yeah. Sorry, I really didn't get on with this one. Not even my usual pro-bird game bias can fix that I'm afraid.
This game feels very amateur in its production. The world is a jumble of low-poly shapes and patterns but, unlike something like Toree or Toree 2, Crow Story makes no attempt to fold this blockiness into its own aesthetic, and the game just comes off as simultaneously ugly and extremely sparse. The sound design is very poor; the only things that seem to have any foley are your footsteps and wingflaps; this is especially noticeable in the extremely simplistic cutscenes, when something like a huge door creaking open will just happen in surreal silence. The music... honestly the music is decent, no real complaints there.
But even worse than the aesthetic roughness, I think, is the level design. This game puts me in mind of random community levels on LittleBigPlanet back in the day, where some overeager young mind would think of a bunch of genuinely somewhat interesting platforming set pieces, and just throw them all together with no sense of structure, flow, progression or balance. Seriously the difficulty curve in this game is all over the shop; it goes from ultra-basic jump spacing to kaizo-level spinning firebar nonsense and back again seemingly at random. There were a few parts where I genuinely had no idea where I was supposed to go and just had to try random things for a few minutes until I managed to fling myself onto the next platform, whether that was the intended route or not. A lot of the time I think the strategy was supposed to revolve around platforming tricks that don't even make any sense and are never taught. As soon as I learned that wall-jumping, turning 180 in-air and then diving forward gave you a height boost, a lot more platforms became accessible; methinks the dev has been picking up tricks from some Mario Odyssey speedruns...
So yeah. Sorry, I really didn't get on with this one. Not even my usual pro-bird game bias can fix that I'm afraid.