Pineapple Smash Crew winner of the Eurogamer 2011 best indie games of 2011,is a top down squad based arcade shooter for the PC, designed and developed by a one man team under the name RichMakeGame! The music was created by Syphus aka Brendan Ratliff who started creating chipmusic for the likes of Coolphat,BDSE and the Swedish megastars Up Rough.
In Pineapple Smash Crew you take control of a 4 Man squad taking on all forms of enemies from zombies to robots with an array of explosive devices mostly being grenades and missiles. Whilst you may think you have control of all 4 of your Squad members, you do not, you control just one of them as the other 3 will just follow you around like mindless zombies while shooting in the same direction you do, however they do find the capability of picking of grenades and other boosts.
You can however swap between squad members this allows you to use their explosive devices that they may have picked up along the way. When you swap between different squad members you will notice your once beloved squad character you were playing has now become and mindless zombie, “well he was an awesome fighting machine”
The aim of the game is collect coordinates, these are placed randomly within the huge number of randomly generated dungeons, and you need to collect the coordinates to be able to reach the final stage of the game.Every mission that you undertake are randomly generated throughout the game (Such as in other games, such as The Binding of Isaac) and can vary with different objectives from having to kill so many enemies in a room, to destroying boxes to find parts for the ship.You do have two options when doing the dungeons, the short root direct to the objective or nuke every room collecting money and gaining more experience to level up your squad.Each one of your squad members can carry an additional item to use against the enemies, these are usually grenades but you do get to pick up can be rockets or health boosts even shields, most of these new items come from the experience system.
As you play through each of the stages you get to collect money for the ship, and you also get to level up your squad members, levelling up as a your squad will allow you to choose or should I say “gain the opportunity” to get new ability’s and new types of weapons that drop with in dungeons.
Should you be unfortunate and one of your Squad dies, a new squad member will be spawned with a random name, you do not get the new member straight away, he will spawn when you next enter a new dungeon. If all your squad die’s don’t worry a whole new squad will spawn all with random names, and you can continue where you where, but you will lose all your money.
Once you have completed the final stage of the game you can go on and play through the game again and again and again….. And so on, as already stated all dungeons are randomly generated. However there isn’t a massive amount of variation amongst the levels, with the enemies staying the same and you will feel like you have played through some of the levels previously.
With only one major collectable item, this being money (used for re-spawns) in the game, makes me think that there could have been a lot more done to give the game more of a variation within the missions. What makes this even more tedious is the fact is the main mechanics of the game never change making the game replay value less than enthusiastic. I got kind of bored of the whole game after about 2 hrs or so, there just didn’t seem anything more to do, yes blowing the shit out of things is fun with all the neat items you have, but this does get boring after a while.
The art style of Pineapple Smash Crew is very retro in feel with its 8bit art style. Your squad members are amusing and somewhat ‘cute’ in away, with rather large oversized armoured bodies and ‘Lego’ styled heads.
Overall the game is highly enjoyable to play, with its neat retro style 8Bit art styles, and great music, with the main issues of the game getting stale on repeated plays. For a one man team though, my kudos and hat goes off to the guy, and deserves some much earned respect for this game.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
