Crashlands - Switch Review

Crashlands is an interesting comedic survival-ish game brought to us by Butterscotch Shenanigans, and yes, their name is a very clear indicator of what to expect. With a wacky cast of characters and a seriously massive map to explore, Crashlands definitely has a solid base to keep you entertained for quite a while.

If I were to sum Crashlands up in a single sentence, it would probably be “Don’t starve without the starving”. You play as an intergalactic package delivery person, who gets shot down mid-flight by a floating head giving flipping the bird at you. As the dedicated employee that you are, your first thought is to save the packages! Followed shortly by pie. As your ship crashes on the planet below, you need to salvage materials to build a temporary base, tools and gear to protect yourself from the indigenous creatures, and create a communication device in order to call for an intergalactic tow-truck.

You meander around the quite expansive map, looking for materials, beating up monsters for their parts, and taking on requests from the locals. As you look for pieces of your destroyed spaceship to help build your communication device, you’ll come across teleportation devices that’ll let you fast travel around the map, which is incredibly useful. Speaking of the map, there are a lot of really useful functions in your available map, as it keeps track of your active quests, transport pads, and any signs you’ve placed as personal markers, and you can filter through them.

Combat is pretty much a “point and click” type style, where you walk up to an enemy and slap it until it dies. Enemies will give you a telegraphed range of where their attacks will hit, and it’s up to you to get out of the way. Even the tougher enemies can be beaten given enough time and practice, so you can still progress, even if you can’t get that drop you need to complete your armour set or that weapon you want.

Crashlands has some pretty good humor, and graphics that look very similar to “Don’t Starve”, or old cartoon animated style. The music is pretty decent, and the controls are fairly intuitive, and everything you really need is carried with you, so you won’t be worried about not being able to harvest materials because you didn’t have room in your inventory. If your main draw to Don’t Starve was the survival aspect, Crashlands might not be as appealing to you, but for those like myself who prefer to take their time exploring a locale, Crashlands would probably appeal to you a lot more. There are some issues with the map not always registering where you’ve been, but they have added a “map rebuild” if that happens, which seems to work pretty well. It does take a while to walk around the map as well, so expect to spend A LOT of time in transit.

Overall, Crashlands is a solid choice if you’re looking for a little less hectic, more role-playing experience than some of the other “survival crafting” games out there. These types of games do tend to be a lot of the same thing over and over again though, so make sure you know you may be in for the long haul if you really get into the game.

Game Information

Platform:
Nintendo Switch
Developer(s):
Butterscotch Shenanigans
Publisher(s):
Butterscotch Shenanigans
Genre(s):
RPG
Adventure
Mode(s):
Single Player

Coop
Other Platform(s):
Mobile iOS and Android
PC

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Richard