basement crawl title

When I first heard about Basement Crawl I had no idea what to expect. The cinematic trailer depicted a girl asking her grandmother why she couldn’t go outside, and the creepy grandmother answered with it being too dangerous. I was expecting a survival horror game of some sort until I saw the gameplay, which looked a lot like Bomberman…okay it was exactly like Bomberman. Still, I loved Bomberman, so I couldn’t wait to play Basement Crawl. The problem is I really can’t play it. The broken lobbies, constant freezing, endless waiting, confusing gameplay, and due to so many other problems I really haven’t been able to ever enjoy Basement Crawl. Let alone play it for more than fifteen minutes at a time.

Basement Crawl looks exactly like a Bomberman—only creepy. The camera looks down at an angle on a board that’s filled with destructible boxes and indestructible walls. The entire premise revolves around dropping bombs to blow your opponents to pieces. It’s a simple premise, one that made Bomberman a household name. The formula and premise are same, but that’s about it. In theory the game should be fun. Seeing how it ripped off a game everyone loves already. There are power ups, sprinting, and shields to make the game a little more interesting. By all rights, this was supposed to be the new game to play with your friends for endless hours of entertainment. It’s not.

Basement Crawl gameplay ps4

The amount of bugs and issues with Basement Crawl is staggering. The game doesn’t even have a match making system. You simply pick a lobby that you want to join, but half the time that never works. You will always end up waiting far too long to join a lobby. I lost count how many times my game would freeze and I would have to close the application. That or the game would be stuck in a loading screen forever, and then I’d still have to close the application. There were times where I would enter into a lobby with other people, but the game would never start. Maybe they were playing the game and I wasn’t? Or maybe we were all just sitting there waiting for something to happen? I have no idea.

I wasn’t able to find a match until over an hour of putting up with freezing and never-ending loading screens. When I finally did I thought that I would enjoy the game and it just needed to fix its online system. I was wrong. I was thrown into utter chaos. I had no idea what I was doing. I tried to be strategic and place bombs only when I thought I could kill someone. After that strategy didn’t yield any meaningful results, I ran around spamming the bomb button constantly, because that’s what it looked like everyone was doing. I ended up winning…I think. It’s very hard to know what’s going on at any time during this game.

I couldn’t play any Team Deathmatch because I could never know who was on my team since there was too much anarchy to really be sure. Throw bombs at everyone, your teammates won’t die, and that’s how you figure it out. It’s hard to know who’s even winning, there were multiple times when it said I was in first, but when the game ended it turned out I wasn’t, so I learned not to trust the score during the game. I would constantly lose myself on the map and have no idea where I was. You spawn anywhere on the map. With all the explosions and other people spawning it is very easy to lose yourself. All they needed to do was put your PSN name above your head the second you spawn and you would know where you were. There were some games that started but no one spawned. The clock would tick down  with no one on the playing field, sometimes this lasted a few seconds, and sometimes it lasted almost half the game.

basement crawl gameplay on playstation 4

Basement Crawl is brutal in its delivery and doesn’t ever throw you a bone to know what’s happening or going on. There is no tutorial besides an image of a controller with button schematics, but that isn’t really enough. There are specials that the game doesn’t explain what they do and there are commands that don’t always seem to work right. Not to mention the controls seem finicky and there are lots of questionable deaths. You have to learn everything through trial and error, but the problem with that is you don’t stick around long enough to ever figure any of it out.

Even after getting my head around most of the game, like figuring out what specials do, how the characters differ, or when the best time to sprint instead of shielding is. I still didn’t ever really enjoy it. The game is pure chaos and there is never any real strategy implemented. Bomberman was all about strategy and that’s why it became so popular. You couldn’t randomly place bombs or you would surely end up in pieces. Basement Crawl is anything but strategy. I won multiple games by standing in a corner kicking bombs across the map the entire game and shielding when I needed to. What seems to be the real winning strategy is running around and dropping bombs randomly, the exact opposite of what the game is intended for.

Winning never gave me a rewarding feeling, and I never thought I was able to kill another player due to my skill. The same can be said for the opposite. I never died thinking that the person trapped me in any particular creative way. I just happened to walk into their bomb because I couldn’t see it among the chaos or dim lightning. Killing or dying was all based on luck it seemed. Having said that, there were some tense moments where I managed to squeeze past a bomb in the knick of time that raised my excitement for a moment. It didn’t last long though, and soon it became pretty clear that no one else knew what was going on either. The games appeared to be very active, but the score at the end revealed everyone would kill themselves more than each other.

Sometimes chaos can be a good thing, and it usually is with a bunch of friends. The rule of thumb generally is even a bad game is fun with friends. This is the exception to that rule, because I couldn’t get any friends to play this game for more than a couple of minutes. One lasted about thirty seconds before asking if we could play something else. I knew there was a good game somewhere underneath all the problems, but if I couldn’t even have fun with my friends. Then there really was no hope in my mind for Basement Crawl.

Basement Crawl gameplay ps4

Calling it what it is: Basement Crawl ripped off the formula of Bomberman, tried to update it, and absolutely butchered everything about it. I tried to join a lobby more recently and there were no games available, so apparently everyone has already stopped playing it. I kept trying and eventually I found a lobby to join. I played a couple games, and then tried to leave the lobby, but the screen got stuck. Not surprisingly, I had to close the application once again. Even if the problems didn’t exist. Basement Crawl really isn’t that fun of a game. It has no single player, only two game modes, four characters, and very generic looking levels that all feel the same. Supposedly, there will be a patch that will fix all these problems and implement some new modes as well, maybe then Basement Crawl might be somewhat of a success, but as it stands now, this broken and unfinished game cannot be recommended for anyone.

This review is based off a review code of the Playstation 4 version of Basement Crawl developed and distributed by Blooper Team. 

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Keep It Locked Away | Basement Crawl Review
Positives
  • Some Intense Moments
Negatives
  • Broken Online Multiplayer
  • Countless Bugs
3Overall Score
Reader Rating: (0 Votes)
0.0

About The Author

Neil has had a passion for video games ever since the Atari entered his life so many years ago. He's been writing about them for over two years and sees no end in sight. Reach out to him on twitter @nconnors13