"Crazy Star Explosion" review: Meat pigeon card space drama

This year we have introduced too many meat pigeon games, such as "Joker Card", "Backpack Brawl" and "Doomsday Surge", all of them through novel mechanics, for the player to bring the sword to the edge of the sensory experience. Almost every month in the Steam Market, there is a meat pigeon creation that focuses on creativity.

However, this also makes the more stenciled, or more "ordinary" works, a scarce commodity. So that when I first started "Crazy Star Explosion", this can be refined "spire Like" template, I feel very nostalgic.

Perhaps the concept of innovation is compelling, but players occasionally want to go back and play something with a more mature system and a more consistent quality.

This is not to say that innovation is a bad thing, but they have a long way to go to improve after they break out of the traditional framework. And markets always need two forces - traditionalists and progressives. The former provides a more solid experience for players, while the latter explores the future direction of the market.

"Crazy Star Abuse" is undoubtedly a relatively traditional pigeon card, its reward is a choice of three, its level is a linear climb tower, it has the customary 3 points of magic crystal, its gameplay follows the card COMBO, you can easily find the shadow of the predecessors from it, and even the game's gameplay does not need me to do too much introduction.

But if you know the players of this studio, you will know that Mad Star Abuse is definitely more than a "spire Like" - because their last work is called "Wolf Gallop", which has a road movie romance like Shinichiro Watanabe's animation.

Therefore, the integration of the fictional layer and the gameplay, and the accumulation of details outside the gameplay content, is the real highlight of "Crazy Star Abuse".

In the game, the player will play as a captain of the universe, playing a chase in space, the player's enemies are no longer grotesque monsters, but a personified planet and star.

Thanks to this, Mad Star Blast has created a very interesting way of fighting - using your crew as projectiles to drop on planets and constantly fill the population slots of those planets. Once the population is full, these planets will be dizzy and unable to do anything for a single round.

In terms of gameplay, it's like a vertigo score. But from the point of view of the fictional layer, these maggots are as dense as white villains, but also visually feedback the player's actions, so that the fictional layer and the game have been highly unified here.

The game play of colonizing and then firing artillery has also become a unique martial art that is exclusive to Mad Star Abuse.

Of course, "Mad Star Abuse" does not completely abandon the traditional mode of play, it is just between different damage cards, independent of a set of special mechanisms to block the enemy population.

Players can completely walk the genre of traditional meat pigeon cards, using various damage cards to make enemies explode in place. But in the face of a personified planet, I prefer the villain gameplay of having the crew crawl all over themselves and then detonate them all in one go.

Don't worry, this isn't some sort of officially recommended cult cult, and the creatures used to crowd people are simply cyborgs, so detonating them won't make players feel guilty.

It is worth mentioning that in the face of the player's crazy colonization of the characteristic gameplay, some enemies have also evolved a corresponding way to fight back - some planets can swallow the body of the cyborg, so as to obtain all kinds of power.

If, in the face of enemies with this special ability, the player continues to throw his minions on the planet, it will only continue to increase the strength of the opponent.

To this end, a richer combat strategy is a necessary means in the process.

For example, the fusion card, which is the most powerful combat tool held by the player.

In contrast to the traditional card game's perfunctory approach to blending material, Mad Star is particularly concerned with making sense of the fictional layers. For example, the bionoids that crowd the population and the metal that packs the armor can fuse into a "big meatball" that causes direct damage.

From the card surface, it looks like the player has hard rolled a "ground burst star", sending a block of cyborg mixed into the enemy.

Although fusion mechanics are not new in the card world, the rationality attached to the fictional layer will make players more interested in the fusion mechanics of Mad Star Abuse. In the course of the game, each card with a strange style always makes me think - if I combine them, what kind of card will I get?

And this is another big selling point of "Crazy Star Abuse", the game provides players with hundreds of different fusion terminals, hundreds of different fusion materials. The cards and effects of these fusion cards, combined with the unity with the fictional layer, will make players willing to explore the universe and try the interaction COMBO between different cards.

However, this also creates a polarizing experience of the game -- many fusion cards broaden the potential of the game flow, but the fusion cards in the game must be merged before they can reveal themselves.

In other words, players need to make at least one reckless attempt to get a terminal card that may or may not be useful at all. This cost can be extremely heavy in pigeon cards, and a poor choice of cards can ruin the entire game in high difficulty.

Just like the fire of "Backpack Brawl" a while ago, it also emphasizes the rich gameplay brought by integration, and also hides all the integration routes. And this has become one of the main slots of the game - if the player in front of the screen is you, would you prefer to choose a card with known potential to consolidate your strength, or pick a card you have never seen before and look forward to the product of fusion?

The former keeps the player repeating the same choices over and over again, and prevents them from trying new ones. The latter represents an outcome that is completely out of your control, where the entire game may be a sunk cost, just to satisfy the player's curiosity.

As a result, the time investment of Mad Star Abuse is likely to be higher than that of most similar games, and players not only need to unlock special cards, but also need to try out their fusion products with different cards to reveal all the hidden content of the game. Until the player has fully mastered every hidden content in the game, the complete game flow will not be officially opened to the player.

On the plus side, the game offers plenty and plenty of content to try; On the bad side, players with this kind of patience will always be a minority of a minority.

In order to let players indulge in it, "Crazy Star Abuse" has tried many special designs, such as the perfect construction of the fictional layer, such as the smooth interpretation of the plot, and such as the visual intuition.

In the game, almost every giant enemy not only enlarges its own body shape, but also adjusts the body shape of the player's controlled character.

For example, when facing the final BOSS, the player is almost reduced to a grain of cosmic sand, which is so much fun.

Although these details do not have a direct impact on the gameplay side of the game, Mad Star Abuse always directly or indirectly shows romance beyond the gameplay. The same is true of the studio's last title, Wolf Gallop, which both have extraordinary appeal to players with special waves.

"Crazy Star" is an unusually mature meat pigeon card, thanks to the market system is sufficiently complete commercial template.

For example, the anthropomorphic planet has appeared as early as "Earth: Evolution", the fusion mechanism is also "never matter" to play more flowers, the gameplay of the introduction of the plot is also interpreted in "The Land of Fraud" and other works, but the space theme and the high degree of unity with the fictional layer, "Crazy Star Explosion" is unique.

This makes the fun of the game not entirely based on innovation, but on the scientific use of existing templates. It is another consolidation of the existing content of the traditional pie pigeon card, so the audience should also be those who are more "ordinary" pigeon card fans.

The game has a unique mechanical pleasure, but its broad framework may be too old for some players, and the choice is all about the needs of the player at the moment.