Ecchi Crush (PS4) Review

 

Ecchi Crush is a Match 3 Game with a picture unlocking twist from Yabai Games, who are also the developers of ‘Ecchi Secrets’ (a Qix clone, similar to Xposed Reloaded and Celebrities/Cuties Hacked) and many other Ecchi Games on Nintendo Switch. They recently also released the picture puzzle game ‘Splash of Color’ (which I have recently reviewed).

Ecchi Crush mostly plays like a classic Match 3 Game. In case you don’t know what that is: You have a board of randomly positioned coloured gems and you can alter the position of one Gem per round upwards, downwards or sideways. If at least 3 gems are connected either sideways or upwards, then they combine and give the player points. The remaining gems will fall down in their place. Cross combinations are not possible. The idea is to form as many and as powerful combinations as possible with the least amount of turns. If you combine, for example, 4 gems in a row instead of 3, then you will get a Super Gem, that upon its next combination can destroy an entire row horizontally or vertically. The most famous Match 3 game is ‘Candy Crush’, which has unleashed a wave of hundreds of clone games, that have released since.

The twist of Ecchi Crush is that you don’t play for a high score, but instead you try to unveil a background image during the course of the match. Every gem position needs to be included at least once in a combination to unlock the image. That background image is part of a larger picture. You need to unlock a couple of these background images to unlock one bigger picture.

As the ‘Ecchi’ name implies, the game features pictures of anime women, which were AI generated, like a lot of F2P Puzzle Games do. As always, whether this affects your enjoyment of the game is up to personal preference.

The base game of Ecchi Crush only contains a single bigger picture on the easiest difficulty. You can buy an additional 2 hard and 4 medium pictures for 2,50 Dollars each. They are also available in a Complete Edition for 14 Dollars, which only saves 1 Dollar and isn’t even really complete. There is an additional 8^th picture only available for owners of the Ecchi Crush and Cyberage Complete Editions bundle or the Ecchi Crush and Ecchi Secrets Complete Editions bundle for 25 and 30 Dollars respectively. I would never consider buying any of that stuff, but that is certainly a nasty move by Yabai Games.

Ecchi Crush features a pretty easy Trophy list, including 1 Platinum and 11 Gold Trophies. The only trophy that doesn’t practically unlock itself is that for finishing a match in under 2 minutes, but it should unlock after a few tries as well. For Trophy Hunters the game can therefore be strongly recommended.

 

Result:

Ecchi Crush is an okay Match 3 Game, which severely lacks in content in the base game. Once you unlock the bigger puzzle picture, there isn’t much replay value besides playing the same one over and over again. Unlocking a background image is the only interesting or halfway unique element of the game, otherwise Ecchi Crush is as basic of a Match 3 game as it gets.

 

4.5/10