For some time trading card games were really popular. And then their popularity was seemingly replaced with poker and gambling. And now with the release of Hearthstone it’s popular again.
So with anything that becomes popular that are streams of copycat killers trying to come around and slay the top rung player.
Crunch Time! has no chance in hell of ever being a slayer of anything.
One of the golden rules with a market dominated by free games is that if people are going to pay for something, they have to be paying for a premium experience. This is not the case with this game. It actually offers far less than a free title would. It’s entirely possible that the market for card games is too full of games that offer a lot for free and that little fish have no room to jump in.
Crunch Time! is a trading card game that has absolutely no trading cards. There is nothing to collect. There are no decks to build. There is no style or strategy. What you get instead is a game that focuses entirely on randomness and removes strategy from the title.
Each player is given five cards to start. Cards can either be “Talent” or Abilities. Talent compose of video game developers, designers, sound guys, and testers. Each has either 2 or 4 turn setting. When a 2 turn setting is used it goes to your game. The goal is to collect completed talent who are working on some part of your game. As their numbers tick down they get added to your title.
To slow this process down you use ability cards. Ability cards come in many ways and are the part of the game that most suffer from balance issues. Some cards can shut down production of only a certain type for one turn, those are fine. The ones that shutdown production for 2-3 turns are not. They shut down production of all types and can be “countered” with situational cards.
Another rather over powered card is the Publisher Contact. This full on removes a single end goal from your score and sets you back several turns.
You must have 5 cards in your hand at all time. So if you expel 5 cards, you get 5 cards. If you have 5 cards, you only get 1 card for the next turn. It drives you to burn through as many cards as you can in order to win. If an opponent gets 5 publisher contact cards, you just lose the game.
The randomness in the game is the major decider of whether or not you win. If you get everything you need you win. If you don’t your opponent wins.
Your opponent is always the computer. There is no multiplayer…. of which multiplayer is essential for this sort of game.
It does have a leaderboard but the leaderboard is private only and only refers to you and computer high scores. Because of that it’s basically useless.
In today’s day and age I doubt this game is even good enough to be on a mobile app. It has some neat ideas, but it’s just missing a lot to make it a worthwhile purchase.
The irony is that they (the developers) are well aware of these limitations. When you go to their website they talk about how they are going to add all of these features into the sequel. And there in lies the problem, they’re not willing to invest in their own product. They’re not willing to make a great game, they’re only willing to sell this cheap tacky half game until the full one is ready.
Because of this is will never ever be a worth while purchase…. and honestly anyone who buys the second one is just supporting a morally bankrupt person.
TheGameGuru.Me 