Crossy Road reminds me a lot of Frogger and Flappy Bird but does it have the same type of appeal as the games that it was based on? Let’s take a deeper look into the game.
I would venture to guess that you have heard of the game Crossy Road by now. When I first learned about the game I went to the application page, had a look at the screenshots and the video and thought to myself ‘this game is strikingly similar to Frogger. Now, if you haven’t heard of, or played, Frogger then I don’t blame you.
This is what Frogger looked like on the Atari 2600. The green and purple splat of colors that you see on the log at the top left of the image is what represented your frog. The three little things below that log is what I can only presume to be turtles. By looking at this image, you probably see the similarities between Frogger and Crossy Road and the whole concept was the same.
Control your animal and make it cross the street, all while avoiding the plethora of obstacles that were all over the place. I wasn’t a very big fan of Frogger but I did play it when I was growing up.
I don’t know if I just didn’t care for the concept or if it was too hard for me or what. So the natural response from me when I found out about Crossy Road was ‘meh, I guess that’s kind of cool’, and I just didn’t think much about it. It wasn’t until a month or two later when I started hearing the buzz about the game that I started to pay more attention to it. I went ahead and downloaded it to my phone and there it sat, waiting to be reviewed. I finally got my hands on the game a few days ago and here is what I think.
Crossy Road Review
Crossy Road comes to us from the game developer team/publisher Yodo1 Games. You may or may not have heard of this company before as they have only released two other games before Crossy Road. One is called Cavemania and it looks like a Candy Crush clone(which of course is a Bejeweled clone) and the other is called OMG: TD! and it looks like a Tower Defense clone. I’m not trying to say these developers are cheap or anything, but it’s clear that they like to take an existing game/genre and put their twist on it. Which is perfectly fine if that’s what you excel in doing. It’s certainly gained them a lot of popularity as they are boasting over 50 million players worldwide for Crossy Road.
So here is level one. Instead controlling a frog, like your did in Frogger, here you are controlling a chicken. I can only assume this is derived from the ‘why did the chicken cross the road’ joke and I will admit, combining that with the similar naming setup of Flappy Bird is pretty clever. You have a couple of ways that you can control your little chicken here. The first thing you learn is that all you have to do is tap on the screen and the chicken will hop forward. The second thing you end up learning is that if you swipe to the left, right or backwards then your chicken will hop in that direction too.
This is all very similar to how things are controlled in Frogger. You have the ability to move forward, backward, to the left and to the right. This allows you the freedom of staying as far away from the obstacles and enemies as possible. And believe me, there are a lot of things to avoid in this game. Not only does this game borrow from the Flappy Bird name but they also used their difficulty curve as well. Don’t get me wrong, you can get a higher score here in Crossy Road than you could in Flappy Bird but the difficulty increases very, very quickly. It’s not long before you’re avoiding trains going too fast for their own good as well as hawks that seemingly come out of no where.
So expect to die, a lot, in Crossy Road, just like you did if you played through Flappy Bird. When you die, you will sometimes get a gift box as you see here. I’m not quite sure what triggers these boxes but they could be from beating your previous top score. I seemed to get one of these almost instantly when I started to play but then I didn’t get another for quite a while. Maybe someone else here knows more about how this game works and can clue me in. Either way, you’ll get a box every now and then and when you open it you’ll get a prize. I was able to obtain two of these boxes and each of them had 100 or so coins in it.
What’s the point of collecting virtual coins if you have nothing to spend it on? The developers of Cross Road have you covered! You have the opportunity to spend your coins(which can also be collected throughout the levels of the game) in this half slot machine half bubble gum dispenser monstrosity. So you get one box, get some coins and spend those coins to get yet another box. However, they could put actual prizes in the first box, I only saw coins come out of it though.
I had received two additional animals from those second boxes when I opened them. The first was a Cockatoo and the other was a Rabbit. I found this aspect of the game rather interesting because it opens it up for those who like to collect in their video games. As a completionist, this is something that I would find fun as it would give me more reasons to keep playing the game. I can only play a game so many times while trying to beat my own, or a friend’s, high score before I get bored. Adding in these collectibles though, that I like.
There are a lot of little animals and character to collect too! At this time there are 90 different ones to collect. Not only that, but each one of these little critters seems to have their own type of level. As I mentioned, I was able to unlock two different characters during the hour or two that I played through the game. Each time I switched to a new character the level seemed to change along with it. Different colors, different obstacles and enemies, etc.
While the Chicken level was green and reminded me of a farm, the Cockatoo had lots of brown(sand?) and reminded me of a desert. I don’t know if this was random or if that is how things were programmed. If it was programmed this way, it makes me wonder why the Cockatoo got a desert style level. I’m probably just looking into it too much though. Either way, I liked that changing the characters also changed the level up. A game like this can be boring(to me) very fast but with things like this changing then it seems to prevent it from getting too stale too fast.
The developers have even added some social elements into the game for you. Sometimes when you die, the game will take a little photo of you right before it happened. Then you just have to press the Share button as shown in this screen and then you can share the image with your friends. I don’t mind seeing things like this in a game, as long as they aren’t making me involve my friends if I want to advance. This seems like a harmless way to make the game a little more social and I’m sure it helped the game go viral too.
The game does have in-app purchases but it doesn’t seem to be tied to a stamina system. Instead, you can purchase those additional animals for $0.99 to $3.99 each rather than unlock them at random from using your in-game coins. This seems like a fair way for the developers to make money. It doesn’t seem to mess with the difficulty curve but that is assuming some of these characters don’t have special powers. Again, if someone has more knowledge about these unlockables than I then I would be interested in hearing about them from you.
Have you had a chance to play Crossy Road game in the Google Play Store? It’s free so the only thing that would stop you is a lack of time or a lack of interest. I don’t see myself putting too much time into it but it does have that great mobile gameplay style to it. Meaning, you can pick it up, play it for 10-30 seconds and then put it down if you need to. This is great for those times that you’re standing in line or waiting for something/someone. But I want to hear your thoughts of the game now. Was it worth your time to play it? Did you get some enjoyment out of it? Let me know in the comments section below.
