Aliens are invading Earth and stealing heavy metal music, coffee, and WiFi!  It’s up to two coffee baristas, Nick and Ashley, to stop them in this 2-D classic styled side-scrolling beat ‘em up.  It’s available to download on nearly all current game consoles, but reviewed on Switch here.

Gameplay is pretty typical of this genre.  You can choose to be Nick or Ashley or play local two player co-op.  Punch, jump, kick, and use special attacks on the aliens and bosses.  You can pick up weapons as well as modifiers that can either power you up or hinder you.  Some make the screen do weird things like make it look like a CRT monitor.  It’s kind of strange and doesn’t really enhance the gameplay much, though.  The game features a heavy metal soundtrack and 16-bit graphics.  And that’s pretty much it, really.

Unfortunately as beat ‘em  ups go, I didn’t really like this one as much.  Hit detection felt a little off, and even on the Easy setting the game is way too hard and I didn’t get very far.  But the worst offender is that if you want to continue where you left off, you have to use a password.  I’m all for using classic game staples, but some things, like passwords, just need to go away.  There’s no excuse for that in this day and age.  I think I know why they did that, though.  Originally, Coffee Crisis was a Kickstarter Sega Genesis game cartridge.  So that’s probably why it used passwords.  I guess you could look up the passwords on the internet and beat the game faster that way, though.  Even so, I can think of a lot better beat ‘em ups to play than this.

Kid Factor:

Coffee Crisis is rated T for Teen with ESRB descriptors of Blood, Crude Humor, Mild Language, Use of Alcohol, and Violence.  Honestly I didn’t really notice much of the descriptors in the game, as they are all used sparingly.  The worst offender is the violence.  Even though they’re aliens, I felt kind of bad beating up the alien grandmas and grandpas attacking me with their canes and walkers!  Younger players may find this game too difficult, and I can think of much better beat ‘em ups to play with your kids.

Tags: Game Reviews