Planet Crashers is an out of this world dungeon crawler that’s downloadable on the Nintendo 3DS eShop. Customize your own character’s gender, hair, skin, and clothes, then venture forth to planets that need your help. On the planets’ surface are booths where you can take on missions, and shops to buy items. Once you take on a job, go to the corresponding dungeon on that planet to retrieve items, find lost people, defeat certain monsters, etc.

The dungeons are mazes full of treasures and enemies. When you bump into a bad guy, a battle will start. In these one on one battles, you’ll trade blows with your opponents. Choose from a list of skills, and earn more after finishing missions. Defeating enemies and completing tasks will earn you experience points, items, and gold. Supposedly you can also play this game locally and online, too.

Unfortunately, Planet Crashers suffers from a long list of problems. They don’t really explain very well what you are supposed to do in the game. For instance, when you take on a job, they don’t tell you that you also have to check it off on your inventory screen for that job to be active (it doesn’t make sense to do that anyway). Battles are also way too hard initially, and too boring to endure. It also takes a long time to gain levels, the dungeons are tedious and repetitive to explore, and the text font is way too small to read. But if you like obtuse and difficult dungeon crawlers, you might like this one anyway.

Kid Factor:

Planet Crashers is rated E-10 with ESRB descriptors of Mild Fantasy Violence and Alcohol Reference. When characters battle, it just looks like two bobbleheads bumping into each other, so it’s not very violent at all. Supposedly, one of the silly weapons you can get is a wine bottle, so I guess that’s where the alcohol reference comes from. Reading skill (and glasses) is a must for all the tiny text. But most kids would probably get frustrated with all the game’s problems. They might like the cute characters and graphics, though.

Tags: Game Reviews