Seditionis Crutarch Royale is a new F2P Shooter on Steam. The game 'stands out' by having a relatively large amount of different game modes for a one person indie game. Crutarch Royale however is being hold back by its simple design and lackluster gameplay.
In its core Crutarch Royale is a simple asset shooter, that uses the same visual engine likes games like Fractal Fury do (that one at least stood out more through its endoskeletons). Visuals and gunplay are therefore pretty simple.
The biggest problem for me is the discouraging gameplay. Movement without sprinting feels ultra slow and jumps are simply not high enough in the game. Your character can seriously not jump higher than around 20 cms, which makes it pretty pointless. At least there is not stamina system, which means you can indefinitely run. That makes the movement at least okay. What is however less than average is the gunplay. Most weapons have small recoil, which I can live with. The TTK however is way too high in this game and makes every player into a bulletsponge. You have to pretty much always shoot a full clip into enemies, which just feels way too long. It is a little bit faster through headshots, but players can still take a couple before they go down. This TTK just feels wrong.
The playerbase for Crutarch Royale is nonexistent and since that very likely will not change, you will have to play against Bots. I do appreciate the inclusion of Bots, since it at least makes the game playable. The Bots in this game however are really terrible. They are completely braindead and will either just stand around and shoot at you, get stuck in the environment or running towards next objective without paying any attention whether they get attacked or kill themselves in the process. I am sure the game would be better by playing against real players, but that also wouldn't change the fundamental gameplay flaws.
What I really liked was the variety of game modes in Crutarch Royale. None of them are innovative in the slightest and we have all seen them done better in bigger games, but Crutarch has Conquest, Capture the Flag, Kill Confirmed, Rush, Team Deathmatch, Deathmatch and a Vehicle mode.
On paper these modes sound great, but in reality they all play pretty much the same. In Conquest for example you can only capture one of the five control points. Two are always located at the side of the other faction and if your players go there, they will get killed by the zone (which isn't going to stop the mass suicide by the Bots). So conquest here pretty much plays like TDM too. Rush, Kill Confirmed and Capture the Flag pretty much do what they are supposed to, however Rush is obviously a lot less exciting and spectacular in Crutarch than in a BF game (You could also say it is a lot more boring here).
The Vehicle mode sounded interesting, but is in reality also more of a buggy mess. The animation for sitting on the 'vehicles' (small children toy cars would be more accurate) is broken and lets the players stand through the ground. There are only 2,3 vehicles around the map, and they don't respawn with the players, which makes them useless... The vehicles also handle totally wanky and awful, plus the Bots are completely overstrained and you can get stuck in them with the vehicles. The vehicle mode is a nice idea, but the execution can't keep up with it.
There seem to only be 4 maps in Crutarch Royale. One is for the vehicle mode (nigh empty grey chessboard ground map), the other three for all the other modes. The first one is really terrible and frankly unacceptably empty, but the other three aren't anything to write home about either. They are located in a desert, a jungle and a winter area. In Rush mode the winter map is slightly differently designed, but otherwise the three maps have a pretty much identical average layout.
Interestingly the game seems to have something like Loadouts for the players, which are pretty similar to the 4 Battlefield classes (conquest and rush game mode also certainly took inspiration from these games). You can select your class, which changes your skin and your ability (the jet pack of the sniper class was rather entertaining, but the others were pretty meh) and you can also freely customize an additional gadget (like more grenades, health pack or ammo pack).
Customizability in Crutarch Royale is actually pretty good. Controls can all be customized and there is a decent variety of audio and visuals settings as well.
The Dev of the game at least seems to be pretty motivated. In his YT videos and the patch notices he promised to continuously work on the game. That being said, I am not sure whether he is going to be able to improve general Gameplay and Bots, which are my biggest concerns.
Pro:
+ Variety of different game modes
+ Movement is okay
+ Class loadouts and gadgets
+ Customizability (Sound, Visuals, Controls) is decent
Contra:
- TTK is way too high (bulletsponges)
- Bots are terrible (stupid + clunky)
- Execution of most modes is rather boring
- Vehicle mode is particularly bad (buggy mess)
- Maps all have nearly identical design
- Game built with simple assets
- No playerbase
Result:
Crutarch Royale's variety of game modes can't hide the fact, that it's gameplay is less than mediocre. The TTK is way too high, Bots are terrible and gameplay generally is just too boring. Maps all have a nearly identical layout and the visuals are simple. There is no real reason to play Crutarch Royale, there are much better alternatives out there.
3.5/10
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