Crash Fever Review: ALICE in Schrodinger's Box (iOS)

(Originally created mid-June)

    Farming for cat food in The Battle Cats gives me the opportunity to see advertisements for a variety of cheap iPhone games. Sometimes I get to see a game advertise itself by listing the most obvious features that would be included in such a game. Other times the advertisement attempts and fails to tempt me with women in skimpy clothing. A few times I even get to see a South Korean company describe their game as an “awesome inflation game,” which only raises more questions, some of them not exactly work-safe. I bring up the topic of iPhone advertisements because they served as part of my experience with Crash Fever, an iPhone game created by WonderPlanet Inc. in 2015 (current version: 1.12.5.0).

    I first heard of the game when The Battle Cats did a collaboration event between itself and Crash Fever. I had planned to check it out Crash Fever shortly after the event started, but I had wanted to farm a bit of cat food first. Then I saw the ads for the game. They featured young women playing the game, most of them using the game’s Fever Mode (more on that later,) while words like “OMG,” “LOL,” and “PWNED you” popped up on the screen. It gave me the implication that the marketing department was made up of either stereotypical teenage girls who love to text, or people who are channeling their best Lenny Wosniak from 30 Rock. The resulting first impression caused me to drag my feet when it came to playing the game, even if I was missing out on possible rewards.

Pictured: The marketing department for Crash Fever?

    Eventually, I decided to play it, and I found myself liking it at first. The game gave me a small blurb about the story, involving a virtual world called ALICE (from Wonderland, of course) and how some AI called The Matriarch has gone haywire, causing the virtual avatars to also go rogue. At the time it felt like the same sort of excuse plot The Battle Cats had, which could be summarized as “cats (and cat-like creatures) want to take over the world.”  I’ll get back to the story later, as it became a more notable aspect of my experience later.

    The main gameplay itself consists of your team, made up of four of your units, or three with a helper from another player under your control, fighting enemies in RPG-style battles where you attack and heal by tapping colored panels that fill lower half of the phone’s screen and are affected by gravity. Getting large chains of like-colored panels also spawns crash panels, panels which share the color and portrait of the creating unit. Breaking these allows for the usage of ‘Crash Skills’ that act like special attacks. You also have skills that charge over several turns and a Fever gauge that, when filled and activated, lets you frantically tap at a waterfall of panels to deal and heal heavy damage. The game also features a multiplayer mode where you can team up with another player with each player controlling their own units and skill usage in a team of four. Overall, the gameplay felt solid and there wasn’t much that needed improvement when it came to gameplay mechanics.

"The power of smiles!" - Boole, as she tries to murder me

    After playing the game a while over three or so weeks, however, I started to really notice some cracks in Crash. For one thing, the game seems to have this weird mix of having a story and not having one at the same time. Schrodinger’s Story, if you will. That blurb I got when first starting up and the lack of follow-up made me think we were getting an excuse plot like in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, where the game gives a short sentence or two telling you to get the Orb of Zot when you start up a game. However, foes in-game kept making references to characters and events I never heard about and were never followed-up upon. For example, I beat a mission where I had to defeat a guy called ‘Ox-Head and Horse-Face,’ and the post-battle text box, usually reserved for small hints, mentions some virtual prison called ‘Illusory Hell’ run by ‘AI King Yama’. This was something the game never hinted at or elaborated upon or anything. I keep hearing things like this and wonder “Am I supposed to be remembering this? Is this important?” That whole thing about The Matriarch has never brought up again; was that important? This “lore” feels disjointed and doesn’t really give me any idea of the world of ALICE.

    The more I played the game, the more I felt like the game world itself was being ruled by some bizarre logic that I couldn’t understand. Why would the game hold a Christmas/New Year’s event in late May? Why is everyone trying to kill me, even during a parade or wedding? Why would someone think causing mass destruction and leaving a signature at the crime scene help them get friends? Is there a legitimate reason this character is giving me flowers one turn and trying to kill me the next? I suppose if the creators were going for that feeling of dreamlike logic from Alice in Wonderland, they’ve nailed it, but I just feel lost.

You know, If MDickie made ALICE, it would explain a lot about everyone's bipolar urges to kill me…

    There also seem to be some problems with the English in the game. Sometimes, the text boxes that describe enemy attacks or provide dialogue wind up going off screen and cutting out text, especially if the speaker is on the side of the screen or the text is longer. This problem was most noticeable in the stage ‘Paula and Danny Invade!’ where about half of the enemy chatter was cut off partway and the post-stage “lore” was formatted bizarrely. I also can catch some occasional weird-sounding dialogue or mistakes in the English, like the word “Let’s” being spelt “Let’ s”. The screen for choosing event quests is a mix of English and Japanese, which gives me the impression that the game wasn’t fully translated before release. It feels like the game’s translation problems aren’t as bad as using questionable terms to advertise your game, but more in the sense that the English feels somewhat unnatural and that the game’s release should have been held backed a bit.

    The problem with the partial translation really rears its ugly head in the menus due to some missions having special restrictions on units you can use. For instance, in one mission titled ‘Seeker of Truth,’ the first enemy starts out by using an attack that will utterly destroy your party if any units aren’t considered mechs. I couldn’t know this because the banner for the mission was in Japanese, giving me the very rude surprise of instantly losing the mission and not being able to continue, another feature these types of missions share. It was kind enough to tell me after the fact what types of units were required for the stage, but it was too little, too late. I already spent energy on the stage, and the rude surprise left me frustrated at how I couldn’t possibly know that important information.

That mission on the bottom has unit limitations. Can you guess what they are?

    Crash Fever is strange in that I want to recommend it, but at the same time, I feel like it might be too early. There’s still some untranslated text in the game menus, and the game doesn’t feel like it’s been 100% prepared for using the English language. The case of Schrodinger’s Story also really bothers me since I keep feeling like I’m missing something important. The game needs to either go with the excuse plot like with The Battle Cats, or be fully invested in creating a cohesive story. It might be worth giving it a while and seeing if it really manages to take off or if we just see it crash and burn.