Red Vs Blue
Crash Commando lets players choose either the Grunts or the Jarheads in an all out battle for supremacy. With the help of weapons, power ups, turrets, vehicles, and jet packs, players have everything they need to destroy their enemies. For starters, you’ll want to check out the single player portion of Crash Commando, which isn’t much, but it’ll get you prepared for multiplayer battles on the PSN. Aptly titled Boot Camp, this mode allows players to play through each available map (there are about eight) with both the Grunts and then the Jarheads (about the only difference is the team color).
Even before playing much of the Boot Camp, do yourself a favor and check out all of the information in the Pause Menu. Everything you need to know about the game from modes to your HUD, to weapons, to controls is all here. The controls are laid out nicely: move with the left analog stick, turn around and aim with the right stick. Aiming is really the hardest thing to do accurately, but a faint trajectory line, kind of like a laser pointer, is shown in game coming out from your player to let you know where your fired shot will go.
Speaking of firing shots, you’ll do plenty of that with the available weapons. All of these weapons are available for use from the start and you can change your load out each time you die before you spawn in again. You’ll arm yourself with one primary weapon, a secondary weapon, and an explosive before heading into battle. The primary weapons include a machine gun, shotgun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, grenade launcher, and the CAB, an interesting weapon that shoots out a beam that can heal teammates and damage enemies (although not enemy vehicles). Each of these weapons performs as expected with their typical balance checks in place (short effective distance for shotgun, slow loading time for rocket launcher, etc). The sniper rifle doesn’t actually zoom, but it does deliver a one shot kill, although with as much movement as you will encounter from other players and bots, getting these one shot kills is not easy.
Secondary weapons are limited to just a pistol with unlimited ammo and a knife while explosives include grenades, C4, and mines. C4 is basically your remote detonation type explosive while the other two are self explanatory. These aren’t all of the weapons available to you though; some of the maps also include turret guns that you can hop onto by pressing X when near them. When you do this you’re taken into a first person view of the map and you can rotate your gun almost 180 degrees. You can’t see anyone but those enemies in front of you so it can be risky using the turret if you’re not protected by teammates. The other stationary weapon you will come across is the rocket launcher; the rocket launcher is neat in that after you aim your rocket and fire, you can guide its direction by using the left analog stick.
Super weapons and vehicles also exist in the field of play to help you win. The super weapons include a Plasma Pulse rifle that doesn’t need to reload but disappears within thirty seconds of use. The mini gun is similar and can actually punch through one layer of wall, too. Vehicles in Crash Commando include a rail buggy and a tank. The rail buggy is basically a jeep with a mounted gun. The gun holds twenty-four bullets per reload and combined with the agile jeep it’s attached to, make it a quick vehicle for getting away or invading an area. Tanks are armed with a heavy turret that fires slowly, but does a good amount of damage; the turret can aim about 180 degrees, kind of like the vehicles in Metal Slug. Each vehicle has a health meter that can be refilled by getting powerups and the vehicles do respawn, like everything in the map, once destroyed. Unfortunately, vehicles cannot be shared.
Jetpacks, Powerups, Modes…
Powerups are available as well; there are five types of powerups to nab including those that refill your health, primary ammo, explosives ammo, and armor. There are also abilities you earn for killing enemies while staying alive; these abilities are activated by pressing the D-pad in the corresponding direction. The abilities include Health Regen, Super Speed, and Death Spin.
Death Spin is likely the only of those that isn’t self-explanatory. With the Death Spin ability enabled, this makes your spins do damage when you contact another player. You spin by turning on your jetpack (holding L1) and pressing down; doing so makes your player either roll really quickly along the ground, or flip/spin while in air. The jetpack system in Crash Commando takes the place of jumping. All players, and even vehicles, have about five seconds of jetpack power when their jetpack meter is full. The meter is a small vertical blue meter that is located directly next to the player in the game; refilling it only takes about five seconds too, but to get around much at all, you’ll want to jetpack often.
Besides running, driving, rolling, or flying about, there are also several tunnels or portals that players can access to get to the ‘other side’ of the map. Each map has two planes basically. From one plane, if you look into your background, you can see the other plane; it’s basically a 3D map, but to get to the other side, you press X near a tunnel or portal and you’re transported to the other side. It’s a neat idea that essentially doubles the size of the map.
So as far as modes, there are a few. The most popular mode online at the time of this writing seems to be standard Deathmatch or Team Deathmatch. There is also an Objective Mode that features two sub-categories, Sabotage and Espionage. Sabotage has one team tasked with destroying three control panels by placing bombs on them. The defending team must keep this from happening for a period of time to win. Espionage objectives require one team to access four terminals in the map to download data from. Each player can only hold two data blocks and collected data must be returned to the home base to be uploaded, so this is basically a CTF mode. Both modes keep the action somewhat concentrated in that each match is split into three stages; these stages don’t incur separate load times, it’s just that the objectives are separated such that the action is focused in one area of the map rather than being completely spread out.
Other Thoughts
Crash Commando is a fine looking game with a good sound package as well. The map locales range from metal factories to tropical settings that shake up the visuals a bit. Backgrounds look good, the animations are nice, and the framerate stays very high throughout. The soundtrack is of the typical instrumental techno genre, but it works well. In game effects get the job done well.
During further testing today there were about thirty active games being played on the PSN. Through all my testing, I haven’t experienced any lag or bad connections to games, which does speak well for the network code of the game.
In closing, it’s worth remembering that how enjoyable a multiplayer game is depends mostly on the players involved. For me, Crash Commando is fun, but team based battles suffer if there aren’t at least three or four players per team because the amount of action decreases significantly with fewer players. That said, it’s not too hard to create or join a game with a sufficient amount of players, so there’s a lot of fun to be had out there. As far as the price, I think $9.99 is a fair price for the game with it being a bit too much were it $14.99, and a steal were it $4.99.