This is perhaps the hardest review I’ve had to write in a long time. It’s not that there is really any challenge, rather, I’m still not quite sure what the hell I think about this game…

Crazy Flasher 3 by Andy Law is a horrible, and yet, fantastic game all at the same time. The art is very stylized and it looks good; but it also looks a bit half-assed at times. Yet, the half-assed look is almost a part of this game’s charm. The characters aren’t drawn with a lot of detail, but they are fairly well animated, and at times they look like classic Double Dragon baddies, as drawn by Salvador Dali.

The backgrounds are all great, and are definite homages to games like Double Dragon and Street Fighter 2. The interface and cut-scene art is also pretty sharp, but not too sharp to be in total contrast to the stylized in-game art.

I think it’s all growing on me… I think I do, in fact, like the way this game looks… I think…
The sound is a bit of a mish-mash of arcade-quality fighter sounds, and lame sound recordings, presumably of Andy Law himself. The fact that the sounds aren’t 100% polished almost compliments the weird look of the game rather than detracting from it.

The music isn’t too bad; a classic street fighter song, some metal loops, some ambient electronica. It all works well and makes the game feel that much more like a classic arcade fighter game.

The gameplay is where I really loved/hated this game the most.

The actual fighting in this game is really simple and fun. You get your standard attack/jump/super-move buttons and you face off against a group of baddies all competing to win a cash prize. When you get into the fighting you quickly learn that, with a few direction changes, you can do cool stuf like grabbing your opponents for a nice punch-to-the-face combo, or hurl them at other enemies. While there isn’t a ton of combos you can preform, there is enough to let you fight strategically and feel like you are doing a bit more than mashing buttons.

What ruined this fun combat system for me was the control layout.

Pretty much every keyboard game uses the arrow keys for movement, and keys to the left for other actions. This game uses W, A,S & D for movement, and B, N, M & Space for the actions. The result of this layout is that your hands are crammed closer together than what is considered a comfortable position for keyboard gaming. To make matters worse, all the action keys are directly above the touch-pad on my laptop, so I ended up accidentally bumping that with the bottom of my hand a few times and losing focus on the game window.

The other thing that bugged me a bit about this game was the rate the difficulty increases. You go from matches that are quite easy, to matches that require you to upgrade your weapons to get anywhere.

While the premise of upgrading to proceed is a great idea, the fact that the good upgrades cost more than you can make in the starting matches means you have to replay the same fights over and over a few times to get rolling.  I got the sword pretty fast, but given how slow the attack rate was with it, it was more of a burden than anything.
The story mode in this game is pretty much generic. The extremely bad dialect and poor english translation is just another instance where poor quality actually adds to the overall quirkiness of the game. It almost becomes a good thing… (It worked for Zero Wing, right?)

Fans of oldschool beat-em-ups will really enjoy this game. It’s definitely worth trying, even for non-fans of the genre, just to enjoy all the quirks that make this game lovable.

If you use a laptop, you might need to disable your touch-pad though… unless you really want that “Free Apple I-Pod”…

[ Play Crazy Flasher 3 ]