Crystal Challenger

Crystal Challenger is a simple 3D arcade platformer that features Andy, a small kid with a big hat and a single goal, to escape.

You can find platformers at every street corner, but most developers settle with just two dimensions. The guys who made Crystal Challenger, from the Binary Flags Game Studio wanted to take things to the next level and added a dimension. You would have really impressed of they would have added a couple more, but we’ll settle with 3D.

To be fair, Crystal Challenger looks and feels like any other platform we’ve tried. It does some things right, but most of the gameplay is just wrong. It might have something to do with the fact that the version number for the demo is 0.5.3, so maybe it’s not finished.

The developers say that Andy, the main protagonist, needs to escape from each of the 120 levels he’s being sent into by the mysterious aura of Summoner crystal. We have no idea what that is, but it must be enough for some motivation.

Andy needs to make sure that he's not touched by enemies, and that he doesn’t jump into the abyss, but that’s what usually happens when you map by default the same button to jump and pick up. Andy needs to find various items and crystals, but it often happens that those crystals are right on the edge, and the player ends up jumping off the map and dying.

The developers are also saying that the final game will also allow users to compete as a team or just on their own.

Crystal Challenger is built on the Unity engine, and that usually means one thing, that it will run well even on low-end machines. It also means that it doesn’t have pretty textures, graphics, animations, or physics. Unfortunately, the game is not good enough to allow players to ignore all of these issues.

The problem is that there are hundreds of platformers out there, and the Binary Flags Game Studio needs to do a lot better if the devs want to distinguish themselves. For now, the best thing to say about Crystal Challenger is that it’s at best mediocre.