Review: CreaVures

CreaVures is a puzzle platformer in the vein of Lost Vikings where you guide your creavures through the forest collecting things. The beginning's relatively simple, but the game quickly becomes more complex as your various creavures' powers are revealed, and you learn to use them in interesting ways.

Rhino beetles would be terrifying if they were really big enough to ride.

Graphics:
Excellently rendered, if a bit weird. The creavures blend in well with the background... perhaps a little too well, as it can be a tad hard to see exactly what's going on sometimes.

The creavures themselves are cute, and the enemies are decent enough, if somewhat benign-looking.

Multiple planes of 3D graphics scroll by as your creavures run through the forest. It's an impressive display of what the PlayBook hardware can do. The planes aren't differentiated enough, though, and I frequently found myself confused as to which parts of the level I could actually interact with.

Overall, I'm not a big fan of the game's style. It's way too dark, and things just sort of blend together.

Sound:
Subdued, but appropriate. The music doesn't get in the way or get annoying, and the sound effects work well.

I knew a guy in high school who could do that.

Gameplay:
It's a puzzle platformer, so there are puzzles and there are platforms.

The puzzles work relatively well. Each creavure comes with a set of powers that can help you move around obstacles in different ways. Pokey can climb certain walls, Bitey has a tail the other creavures can swing on, Zappy can jump well in water, and so on. While they were never particularly difficult, I found that the puzzles became more interesting as my team gained more creavures and I progressed through the game. Shocking a bird with Zappy while swinging on Bitey's tail is very satisfying.

The platforming is just bad. You control the characters with a virtual analog stick and a jump button. Movement is far too imprecise, jumping is way too floaty, and sometimes button presses just plain aren't recognized. I understand it's a limitation of the hardware, but I'm sure the controls could've been fine tuned at least a little bit more. It's rare, but when you have to restart a puzzle for the third time because you missed a jump that you should've made easily, the game can be really frustrating. Fortunately, checkpoints are plentiful, so it never gets too egregious.

Swapping between characters is handled with a simple tap of a virtual button, and once you get more than two, you can swap one out at any checkpoint. It all works well, and I never had a problem with it.

Three creavures are better than one.

What I liked:
-Cute characters.
-Interesting puzzles.
-Epic boss battles. Well, not epic, but suitably grand.

What I hated:
-Floaty controls.
-Bad platforming segments.
-Difficulty discerning foreground and background from playable part of the level.
-Levels are way too dark.
-Occasional crashes.

Final Verdict:
CreaVures is good, but the poor controls and floaty movement keep it from being great.

CreaVures is available for free (courtesy of RIM) from Union on BlackBerry App World
Reviewed version 1.0