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Crab God Review

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Crab God

Crab God is such a fun colony management game. It reminds me a lot of the Kingdom series but then with cute crabs. Completion probably takes around 30 hours or more, it has no missable achievements as you’re supposed to do multiple runs.

Steam

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 30h+ (This depends on how good you’re/ how lucky and on which difficulty you’re playing)
Estimated achievement difficulty: 4/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: multiple, but the run’s aren’t long
Is there a good guide available: Not yet, but you don’t need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: For me the 100 crabs sacrificing felt a bit like a grind because of the animations taking a little bit of time.
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: Yes, there is an achievement for finishing a run in under 30 days. However, you can always resurrect 2 crabs if you didn’t finish your last run, so you could prep 2 awesome crabs before starting this challenge
Time-gated achievements: Yes, there is an achievement for choosing 5 different eco rewards and you can choose up to 5 a month. so make sure you choose different ones
RNG-achievements: Some are a little bit, like finding the different ritual bonuses, but nothing too bad
Does difficulty affect achievements: No, you can play on the “cozy” (aka easy) and still unlock achievements
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: At this moment yes, will talk more about those at the bottom of this review.

Crab God is a cool colony management game, in which you play through different loops. Think about the kingdom series but shorter loops and cuter artwork. Also less deep but more accessible to a wider audience. There isn’t much of a story and after doing everything the first time you have seen almost everything. However, this type of gameplay benefits so much from the achievements it has, and the developers/publishers did a great job of challenging their players to try a different approach in the next loop.

In this game there are 5 different roles your crabs can have:
– Gardener > this roll will plant and level up plants which will attract different kind of fish
– Scavenger > This one will collect food, which is the mean resource you need to continue to the next level
– Worshipper > This one will collect favor, which is needed to change the roll of a crab, plant and upgrade plants and hatch eggs for extra crabs
– Builder > This one destroys obstacles and opens up clam shells for Favor and Food, it will also help fight the baddies it night
– Hunter > This is the real fighter to keep the treat away at night

You can switch roles during a level if you aren’t happy with your setup but most of the time you’ll want a mix of all of them to help you out. In a level you collect food to complete the level, this food is used to level up crabs and unlock new bonus stats. However, you can stay longer in a level and get a maximum of the double amount of food needed, so you level up your crabs further. You just can’t leave a level during the night when the enemies are there and each day you stay longer in a level, the difficulty of the enemies goes up. So it is a balancing act between leveling up your crabs and getting more bonuses but still staying alive. You can also leave earlier, but then you have to sacrifice crabs to help out with the food goal and if you ever sacrifice your 5th crab in a run, the run instantly ends. The level of the crab determines how much food it is worth, but most of the time those are the ones you want to keep alive because they have such sweet bonuses.

Losing a run isn’t the end of the world… it can even help you out. Each run you start with 5 crabs, but if you had some alive from the last run you can take them with you again, and if you had less than 5… you can resurrect 2 of your old crabs, so this gives you a much stronger start to a new run. This isn’t the case when you win a run, then you start all over from nothing.

One of the fun but sometimes challenging things you can do in a level is trying to complete the ritual stones that you found in there. Each stone has its own requirements and after you complete it you get a bonus that stays active during this current run. Most of the challenges require you to attract fish type A X amount of times. And for that, you have to plant coral and plants. One of those bonuses is that you can level up plants to level 3 instead of only level 2, this one was my favorite as it helps you out so much with future challenges.

About the achievements: I love the type of achievements this game has and as stated above how it challenges you to do different things in each run. It is also nice that most of the time you can combine a bunch of them if you plan ahead. for example: getting 2k favor in a level combines very well with staying in a level for 30 nights, and maybe even combine that with having 10 crabs killed in a run if you do this very late in the run and mostly choose your levels based on how many crabs could be found there. there are more combos like this which add up nicely together.

However, at this moment a bunch of achievements are broken and one of them is for content not yet in the game (Tide Trial). While I played through the game I told the bugs I found to a very responsive community manager. she was lovely, very responsive and I saw already some bugs fixed. So I believe the bugs will be ironed out with time. At this moment I couldn’t unlock the following achievements: Pacific March, Divine Intervention, Eco Legend, Life Giver, Tide Trailled.

I give Crab God 4 out of 5 stars. This score is not impacted by the buggy achievements, I have fate that they will fix those and I just enjoy the pure game loop that is in Crab God a lot.

Publisher:
Firesquid Logo

Developer:
Chaos Theory Games Logo

This review for Crab God was written on 20 June 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 41 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.

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