Recent reviews by CallMeMango

What you all are most likely wondering;
Is it worth your money?
Yes.

To elaborate, for $12.99 CAD (at point of writing) I would say that it is a fair price given the current "Early Access" state of the game.

There is a very well designed "Base of Operations", with multiple weapons to unlock and choose between and character skins that are available to you upon unlocking them (No micro-transactions at point of writing).
The gameplay itself is fluid, once you get used to it it's pretty easy to almost BHOP your way around the map and avoid any "serious" confrontation. Three different difficulties gives you some replay-ability out of the gate so you could easily expect to put anywhere between 8-12 hours just into the initial content before you start to notice the glaring drawbacks that inevitably come with an early access title. Nothing insanely major mind you, but just enough to make you want to pull your hair out.

The first major one?
Difficulty
In Crab Champions you have three different difficulties: Easy, Normal and Nightmare. You start on the "Normal" difficulty by default and i'd say I probably attempted to beat it about 5-8 times before I thought I must be missing something and decided to put myself into Easy difficulty to compare what I was doing wrong. Turns out that Normal Difficulty suffers from EXTREMELY difficult RNG. I couldn't believe the difference between the two. the perks I was getting on Easy were quite literally holding my hand through the entire game. Got all the ammo upgrades/damage output/money upgrades/AoE effect perks I could ever ask for. and then I go back to "Normal Difficulty" and it feels like the RNG is turned up from a 2 to an 8 on a 1-10 scale.
Out of EIGHTEEN Normal attempts only two of those was I fortunate enough to get some decent RNG on the chests to keep me going. One of those attempts making it all the way to Island lvl 120 before deciding to call it quits. This leads me into my next point...

Combat
Obviously the core of the gameplay is in combat. What irks me is that it really doesn't feel that rewarding. It starts to boarder that monotonous-esque feeling. The Crabs, Ants, Pufferfish & Slugs are easy enough to deal with. The Skulls & Elemental Ants/Slugs are definitely a nuisance...but MAN the Fire Crab's, Rocket Crabs, Sniper Crabs (as others have mentioned) seem like they've got their aimbot turned up to a 12. you better pray to god that your RNG got you FMJ or you're in for the time of your life.
Also, pretty much right away I made the conscious choice to not use melee whatsoever during my playthroughs. to much risk v. reward. Why would I get within smacking distance when I can just BHOP around giving me that buffer? Would love to see melee implemented into said "difficult crabbies" to do some extra DMG. Other than that, as other's have mentioned, I also did not enjoy the fact that there isn't a "spawning buffer" around my PC and that the crabbies could quite literally spawn RIGHT. BEHIND. YOU. or under you if you're in the air. Definitely kept me on my toes.

Level Design
The game has a few level layouts that get randomly generated as your playthrough progresses. All in all they are not to bad. One thing I noticed I did was mostly anytime I had a "Flawless" Blessing (Meaning you get an extra loot chest for taking no DMG) and the Horde Countdown combination I'd just BHOP around the map until the timer ran out to guarantee a second perk chest. I don't know if this is a good thing to do or not...but again, the combat isn't THAT rewarding so if I could avoid it for extra perks why wouldn't I?

Perks
Another gripe would have to be the images for all of the perks. there are currently roughly four or five assets for ALL of the perks.The shapes are Star, Bullet, Heart, Weird Orb thing (for your grenades) and there may be one more but I can't remember. It isn't so much that there are only a couple assets as they do their "general" job of grouping your perks together but the images within each asset when I mouse over it is the same if that makes sense. So even though I've played this game for 10+ hours I STILL have to check every. single. one. to make sure that that IS indeed the perk i am choosing. Would of course love to see custom assets for all of the perks at some point so that you can from a glance see if its the one you want or not but some QoL there would be phenomenal. I'd imagine we could see something along the lines of that in a future update.
Also, to be able to see what the perk does would be nice if the description isn't clicking for you. Maybe in the Base of Operations (where you can still "Tab" to view your non-existent perks currently) The perks that I've collected during playthroughs can be found there and when moused over a small video plays above the description with what exactly it does? For verification purposes it would be nice.

Shop
To add to my previous paragraph. During playthrough you will periodically come across Tony's "Shop" where he sell's a slew of perks + has a training dummy to his right for you to see your DPS overtime during your playthrough. While we do have a training dummy in our Base of Operations why on earth would I want to just see what the BASE DPS of any of the guns can do? I want to see how much DPS I can get out of my perks with various guns to see what meta would work best for each weapon. no? just me?

ANYWAYS. If you've gotten this far I appreciate the time you've taken out of your miserable day to read my miserable review. Would love to have some more common Rogue-like players insights into some of the things I noticed as someone who doesn't play them very often. Cheers!

The game definitely needs some work still.
Constantly questioning where and how you got shot from as you're running out of your HQ. No safe zones even within the HQ which opens you up to spawn camping galore. And because the HQ spawns don't change location you don't have a fighting chance at being able to flick on the camper. make it so there are multiple spawns within the HQ.

Engineers not being able to place their utilities anywhere actually functional. Believe it or not, vastly open fields don't count. When im walking around with my wrench out for 10 minutes trying to find a PERFECTLY flat zone to place something like a bunker, for example, without a doubt ruins my immersion. We should be able to have it where the wrench items build INTO pre-existing entities. like a wall...or tilled SLIGHTLY uneven soil or a grassy knoll.

Sniper squads should have the choice of being able to switch from scout to sniper. Why am i being punished when I load into the game first? Why can't I change from scout to sniper if I've made a squad already? Once a scout squad has been made your chances are nil-all to actually get into said (normally locked) squad and participate as a sniper...which means I specifically have to coordinate with friends I have outside of the game (using Discord or TS) so that at JUST the right time we can get one.

The audio and even the gunplay in this game leave a sour taste in my mouth. Constantly misshearing where people are walking or just straight up NOT hearing footsteps when they are behind you is infuriating to say the least. Gunplay feel's disconnected from movement like you wouldn't believe, promoting most people to just camp in one spot until the other gives in and attempts to push. Take a wild guess how that turns out.

Not to mention that since the update they did a couple of days ago hit reg is off and reloading glitches on you, which means that all of the most important low level weapons (Bolt Actions) that most beginners get have become almost if not completely unviable.
When people kill you you don't see who did. Which means if there IS a hacker in your server you won't be any the wiser as to who it is. A simple "You were killed by Insert Username" would be a phenomenal step in giving your playerbase some peace of mind.

I really did try to enjoy this game...but man...coming from hours of Squad it's difficult for me to see anything but the negatives in this game. If you're looking for a decent WW2 game this is about as real as it gets. but the drawbacks make it tough for me to want to recommend this to my friends who play Squad or games alike.

Love it!
would've been nice to see some playability post campaign completion beyond just straight replaying said campaign just as another house. one or two special fetch quests is not enough for me to replay.
Would love to see some DLC for this in the future as we really didn't utilise the entire southern portion of the map...just feels like a waste of space at this point in time!
But what a treat it was to experience Hogwarts in Unreal Engine 4 for the first time. And the fact I finally felt like a kid again.

Cannot believe i shilled out 100+ dollars for this garbo game. save yourself the money...buy BF4, on SALE.

Hands down...one of THE BEST co-op FPS games i've ever played.

From the music, to the missions, to the characters, the community, map and space rig design...my god even the small quirks and references to other games and movies are a treat and sight to behold! I have never had a game run so well before its official release date (yesterday at point of writing)
I look forward to seeing what the future has in store for this game! I will be behind it 100%!

Seriously, you owe it to yourself to give this game a shot.
by yourself, you'll have a blast!
With your friends...Hoxxes AWAITS!!

FOR KARL!

absolute pop madness!

easy 20 lvls hahaha definitely recommend!