Cartoon Network: Battle Crashers

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Cartoon Network: Battle Crashers

This game will make you want to Battle Crash your head into a wall.
Genre(s): Beat 'em up
Platform(s): Nintendo 3DS
PlayStation 4
Xbox One
Nintendo Switch
Release Date: Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
November 8, 2016
Nintendo Switch
October 31, 2017
Developer(s): Magic Pockets
Torus Games (Switch)
Publisher(s): NA: GameMill Entertainment
EU: Maximum Games
Country: France
Australia
Series: Cartoon Network


Cartoon Network: Battle Crashers is a side-scrolling beat 'em up video game developed by French studio Magic Pockets and published by GameMill Entertainment in North America and Maximum Games in Europe. It was released for the Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on November 8, 2016, with the Nintendo Switch version on October 31, 2017.

Plot

The protagonists of six Cartoon Network shows must defeat the shard creatures.

Why It Crashes

  1. It is an extremely obvious rip-off of Castle Crashers by The Behemoth. It even has a similar-sounding title.
  2. The game relies on excessive backtracking to do fetch quests to artificially pad out its length. While this philosophy is seen in many indie Metroidvania style games, this game butchers this concept altogether as these fetch quests do nothing but tank the pacing of the game experience.
  3. You can only play as six characters (Finn & Jake together as one, and Mordecai & Rigby together as one) and only six shows are represented in the game, those being Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Clarence, Regular Show, Uncle Grandpa, and The Amazing World of Gumball. Their weapon of choice ranges from broken to weak;
    • Finn & Jake is a hammer melee fighter with only one attack animation.
    • Mordecai and Rigby has a lightning attack that has very high range and can be spammed very easily against melee enemies.
    • Uncle Grandpa has a flamethrower that has inferior range and is unreliable to use against enemies.
    • Gumball has a vacuum cleaner that isn't really impressive and feels like it was improvised from the source material used. The vacuum, for whatever reason functions more like a shotgun that has low range.
    • Steven uses a bubble attack that has to charge-up to deal more damage. The attack even has a very short animation that it encourages button mashing.
  4. Poor grasp of the source material: Steven Universe (currently one of Cartoon Network's most popular and well-reviewed shows) isn't really represented well in this game. First of all, only Steven (the main protagonist of that show) is playable, one of Steven's attacks in the game is a bubble, even though it is only used for defensive purposes in the actual show (though to be fair, the devs didn't really have much to work with in regards to Steven's abilities from the show). One of the game's hidden items is a map to Beach City, even though Steven already lives there. Finally, Frybo (a one-off antagonist in the actual show) was used as the boss for the SU-themed levels instead of any of the show's recurring antagonists (such as the Homeworld Gems).
  5. Missed opportunity: The game lacks any characters from the 1990s and 2000s Cartoon Network shows such as, Dexter's Laboratory, Ben 10, Johnny Bravo, The Powerpuff Girls, Courage The Cowardly Dog, Time Squad, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Camp Lazlo, The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, Chowder, Cow & Chicken, I Am Wesel, My Gym Partner's a Monkey, Squirrel Boy, Ed, Edd n Eddy, Samurai Jack, Codename: Kids Next Door, and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, all of which are still known to this day as iconic shows, the game only has characters from 2010s Cartoon Network shows (except the four described below).
    • Remember to keep in mind that Apple & Onion, Summer Camp Island, Victor and Valentino, and O.K. KO Let's Be Heroes! all didn't exist at the time, because they were not on the air yet.
  6. Low-quality production value: Similar to Rocky and Bullwinkle (2008),the game tries to emulate the 2D cartoon artstyle in video-game form running at 60fps. However, the execution comes across as very cheap and low-quality. At best, the game feels like it was made in just 3 to 4 months, as most NPCS barely have any animation and freeze in place when you talk to them.
    • It feels like a Flash or Unity browser game that someone decided to greenlight as a full console release. You could simply make it into a Flash or Unity game that you could play in your browser on Cartoon Network's website (and some other ones) and it wouldn't make much of a difference.
    • Cheap graphics that look like a free Flash game on Newgrounds made by one person, even though it partially went for a 2.5D look.
    • Terrible animation in every way possible, especially since all the respective shows this game was based off did this better.
  7. Bland and uninspired boss battles that often rely more on enemy hordes than being challenging.
  8. No online co-op.
  9. Several parts of the game require you to farm gems to continue progression, such as gates or sections that require you to pay a number of gems to unlock or use.
  10. Like Ghostbusters (2016 video game), which was the last Activision licensed game before GameMill/Outright made these games relevant again, levels consist of waves of enemies that have very little difficulty to beat. There's no new abilities or any new uniqueness introduced in the game at all.
  11. There's no voice acting for the characters as the game uses text boxes.
  12. Even after the overwhelmingly negative reception the game received, it was ported to the Nintendo Switch nearly a whole year after it was released, but that version wasn't an improvement in the slightest.
    • The Nintendo versions of the game are notably inferior to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions, with no multiplayer support for the 3DS version (it would've required 2-4 3DSs, each with their own copies of the game, either physical or digital) and no Pro Controller support for the Switch version.
  13. Dumb final boss concept. The final boss is disguised with several masks faking random characters until it gets down to Uncle Grandpa. Uncle Grandpa is actually one of the characters that confront this masked final boss. In fact, this whole scene is a cliched reference to Scooby-Doo.

The Only Redeeming Quality

  1. Despite all of the game's issues, the box art can be really cool to look at, especially the artworks of Jake, Clarance, Uncle Grandpa, Mordecai, Gumball, Finn, and the box-art manages to be pretty well-drawn.

Reception

Battle Crashers received extremely negative reviews from critics and fans alike. A reviewer for Daily Mirror described it as a "glorified browser flash game", and wrote that "real talent goes into making something this bland out of characters as interesting as these." PlayStation LifeStyle was another publication that wrote it had the feel of a cheaply-made flash game: "Quite frankly, this feels like a Flash or Unity game, that someone decided to greenlight as a full console release."

Some reviewers also criticized the padding of the game's length due to the fact that the player has to replay certain stages just to get a hidden item. Jed Whitaker of Destructoid was one of these critics, and was especially harsh towards the poor grasp of Steven Universe source material in the game.

Trivia

  • The website of the game shows a DS version, but this version does not exist, meaning that it was probably planned but never released as the DS was no longer supported by the time the game came out. The PlayStation 3, Wii, Wii U, and Xbox 360 might have seen similar, despite the game was not being planned for those systems.
  • In the box art, Mordecai is seen shooting a beam from the Power Glove, an infamous accessory released for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

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