Super Crush KO Review
It’s a knockout.
Cats. One of humanity’s most adored animals, second only perhaps to dogs. If you’re a cat owner, have you ever questioned the lengths you’d go to for your feline friend?
Hopefully your commitment as a pet owner is never tested as thoroughly as Karen of Super Crush KO. When her beloved Chubbz is kidnapped by an alien invader, she has to fight an army of killer robots and giant mecha to try and get him back. Thankfully, she’s not only a natural at such a task but even manages to look good doing it.
Super Crush KO is a side-scrolling brawler in which the combat is absolutely the main focus and star of the show. It’s strongly reminiscent of the brawling of Guacamelee, featuring combo-based fisticuffs with multi-directional special moves that let you rush, juggle and slam enemies. The main difference, of course, is that these moves don’t have names like ‘Rooster Uppercut’ or ‘Dashing Derpderp’.
Once you’ve internalised all the abilities at your disposal, fights become a glorious ballet of flurrying limbs, explosions and even gunfire from the regenerating pistol you can shoot at ranged enemies. It’s addictive to try and nail ‘perfect combos,’ non-stop sequences of mayhem in which you take down several waves of enemies in a string of attacks without taking a single hit.
These are actually more achievable than they sound, too. Super Crush is generous with its combo window and special move recharge, and your attacks can often stun enemies, while an invincibility dodge helps you avoid attacks you can’t interrupt. It empowers the player rather than punishing or frustrating them.
That’s not to say it’s a complete pushover. With an increasing number and strength of robots to defeat over the course of its 20ish levels, you’ll have to sharpen your fighting skills – in classic, increasingly uncommon style, you don’t earn more abilities and power over the course of the game but rather have to get better at using what you’ve got.
Its difficulty is perhaps the most enjoyably balanced that I’ve seen from a game in some time, with a pleasingly linear learning curve. It’s not particularly tough to just make it through the levels, with five continues given per stage. But beyond that, you can try for S-rank stage ranks, to complete levels with no deaths and all perfect combos, and then finally to compete across the leaderboards. There’s a challenge here for everyone.
Super Crush isn’t lacking in charm, either. The game is animated in an array of saccharine pastel colours. While its screenshots might look fairly basic, it makes a better impression in motion. Comic book-style cutscenes are also scattered between levels, and while they’re brief and tell a straightforward story, they’re nonetheless engaging and amusingly written.
One of the main things that lets the side down is the repetition of its design, however. The scenery across all levels consists of slightly varying cityscapes in different colours, and its enemies are all just variations of robots. Super Crush has a distinct theme and it does it well, but it perhaps sticks to it a little too closely.
It at least makes a token effort to mix things up gameplay-wise in later levels. Over time, robots with more diverse abilities get thrown into the mix, including force fields, scatter guns and exploding mines triggered upon their destruction. Levels, too, become increasingly mired with hazards like spike traps and lasers – the latter is perhaps the only inclusion which can feel awkward and frustrating to dodge at times.
I honestly wasn’t expecting much from Super Crush KO, but it turned out to be a delightful surprise. This cutesy and colourful brawler lets you lose yourself in a satisfying flow state of flashy combos as you beat its hordes of alien robots into scrap. And with a fluffy cat at stake (and all of mankind, I guess), it’s all for a good cause.
[Reviewed on Switch]