Viveport Review: Crashimals Review

Reduce tasty-looking cakes to crumbs in this Angry Birds style puzzle game.

By Desmond Madison, Greenlit Content

Bombs away! Developer Rogue Earth takes you to an island airport full of crash-happy animals, or Crashimals, if you will, across 72 physics-based puzzles that have you soaring through the skies and dropping bombs on some… birthday cakes?

It's pretty clear that the concept behind Crashimals is effectively VR Angry Birds with Airplanes, and that’s not a bad way to describe this light-hearted action puzzler at all. So strap in, buckle up, and take to the skies with a motley crew of badgers, giraffes, hippos, and flamingoes all armed to the teeth with explosives.

 Just like Angry Birds, the concept is simple: see building, knock down building, gain sweet, sweet points. The main difference here is that instead of an army of pigs, you’re out to destroy the Kaiser’s cakes before he takes over the world. Each animal will have its own unique bombing characteristics as well. The hippo starts things off with a simple arching curve dropping bombs from above, and as the game progresses, you’ll play as other Crashimals with new bombing techniques altogether. There are homing missiles, cluster bombs, timed explosives, and more bang for your buck as you take down each cake one by one.  Once everything is in your arsenal, you’ll be able to decide which method of cake destroying you prefer the most and stick to what works best for you. Remember, though, that while you can use any Crashimal you like once unlocked, some puzzles are best set up for a preferred style of mammalian mayhem.

While there’s a ton of puzzle variety across this adorable and explosive adventure for all ages, there’s something to be said about the control scheme that many players may find difficult to learn at first. It’s a tricky combination of steering your plane from far away with one hand and dropping bombs with the other while standing still. It definitely takes some getting used to, especially as you speed up or slow down the plane on the fly. Most puzzles start off easy enough to take the shotgun approach, but as the game continues, your bomb placement will need to be more precisely accurate in order to topple the towers just right. Your arms will squirm and it will take quite a while until you’re feeling comfortable with the controls. That said, it may even take until you’re completely through the game that you start to feel like you’ve mastered things.

In the end, Crashimals takes the tried and true physics-based puzzlers of the casual mobile gaming world and translates them nicely into the VR space.  It’s explosively charming, and it’s a solid game to help introduce some players into VR if their mainstay is playing games from this genre in the touchscreen space. Stick with the control scheme until you’ve earned your pilot wings, and keep pushing onward to the skies for a delightful puzzle experience that takes the proverbial cake.

Crashimals is available on Viveport, and in Viveport Subscription.