Games I Beat: Crisis Beat

Crisis Beat
Beat 'Em Up
1-2 Players
System: Playstation
Developer: Soft Machine
Year of Release: 1998 (Japan), 2000 (Europe)
Beaten: July 17th, 2014

Crisis Beat has to be one of the slowest, most tedious co-op beat 'em up games I've yet to force upon myself and a friend, this is just not anything worth wasting your time with. It's insultingly simple, with two attack buttons, a special attack button that drains health, a run and a jump button it takes next to no time to familiarize yourself with the controls. You can pick up items, though they either are simply thrown, or break almost immediately anyway and lacks a notable increase to damage output. Combos do exist, though I'm not sure how I executed them, I would just switch between the attack buttons at random. You can even throw your opponents, but again this seemed to happen at random. Don't worry though, precision and talent aren't necessary in this game.

The problem comes from the enemies. They don't do anything. Standard enemies just soak up attacks while standing there and don't often attack back. Seriously, the only time I found myself in danger (aside from the final boss) was when I over used my special attack as it drains HP. The strategy for every boss was simply attack them until they fell over, then attack them once they stood up. To be fair you'd usually have to run away briefly as they would attack whilst getting up, but I'm really hoping you caught my sarcasm here. Even the final boss was easily conquered with this strategy. He did manage to actually start taking our lives though, but only due to how much of a damage sponge he was. Add in how everything just feels sluggish and you've got yourself a pretty boring game.

Thankfully it's short, coming in at about six maybe seven stages, I didn't count. There are two groups to play through the game with and apparently a couple stages are different, honestly though I couldn't stand the thought of playing through this again. The story is seemingly simple, terrorist attack a boat, you attack the terrorists, but thanks mostly to a lousy translation nothing makes sense. It has that awkward bad translation charm that usually comes with the territory but it doesn't make the Crisis Beat worth playing.

This game was never released in the US and honestly I'm grateful. I can't really think of a single positive thing to say about this game. When my friend and I played through we joked about how it was made as simply a test to make sure 3D graphics were possible, or that the developer could in fact program inputs for a PS1 controller. Had I not written this you may very well have never even known about its existence, and all I've really accomplished is worsening your life just a bit, this is how bitter the game left me.

The original PlayStation is lacking in multiplayer games (specifically co-op) and this game doesn't do much to inspire hope in me. You won't miss much by ignoring this game.