Is the first rule of Fight Crab not to talk about Fight Crab?  Well too bad because I’m talking about it anyway!  Fight Crab is what you expect it is.  You’re a crab, and you fight other crabs.  Punch and pinch your opponents, and use weapons like swords, guns, maces, and even chainsaws that your little crabs grab with their claws!  Fight underwater, on beaches, as a giant crab in a city, on a dinner table, or even at the seafood section of a supermarket!  It’s as weird as it sounds, and it’s available on Switch and PC, but reviewed on Switch here.

To control your crab, you can choose to use motion controls or buttons to wave your claws around.  I found it easier to use just buttons.  The left and right sticks will move your claws, and the L and R trigger buttons will make you punch.  Use your pincers with the L and R shoulder buttons to grab the other crab, or take away their weapons if you’re lucky.  You can also grab certain things in the environment to use as weapons, too.  Move around with the face buttons, and when you take enough hits, you can go into Hyper Mode where you are extra strong and can even throw fireballs, but it’s hard to do.  If you manage to tip over your opponent for three seconds, you win the round, but you lose if you get tipped over yourself, or if you fall out of certain arenas.

There are a couple modes of play.  There is an extensive single player campaign with a long interactive tutorial mode and lots of regular stages.  If you lose, you can ask for assistance from another crab and try again, and after that you can even call for air support!  As you play this mode, you’ll earn points which you can use to level up your crab’s stats, or buy new crabs to play as or weapons to equip them with.  There is also a versus mode where you can play against or with another local player, or you can even go online.  But you’ll need two extra JoyCons for couch play.

And that’s pretty much the game.  Only problems I had was that one, it was a bit buggy.  Or should I say crabby?  It froze up on me once, and another time when I fell of the seafood counter, it kind of froze up but I could still move the camera around the entire supermarket, so that was kind of cool?  And two, the game is too chaotic to tell what you are doing sometimes.  I think this would’ve made a better arcade game where you could just plunk a couple of quarters in for the novelty of fighting as crabs.  But if you want something weird and wacky to play, Fight Crab definitely fits the bill.  Or pincer.

Kid Factor:

Fight Crab is rated E-10 with an ESRB descriptor of Fantasy Violence.  You punch other realistic looking crabs and use weapons on them like blades, guns, and chainsaws.  But there is no blood or no dismemberment of crab legs.  Defeated crabs just flip over on their backs and that’s it.  Reading skill is helpful for the text, and younger gamers may find it too difficult.

Tags: Game Reviews