Skills and teamwork win
It’s a complicated game, and it has multiple ways to win. You can level up your team with Essence and make it much harder for the enemies to take each one of your teammates down. But in Heart of the Hives and Harvester Command, you have to fight bosses to claim territory.
To do that, you have to work together. If you are taking a point, you are vulnerable so someone else has to protect you. If you can get three players up against one, you’ll win every time. And if you are smart about using the environment to your advantage — like getting the invisibility powerup or medical powerups at just the right times — you can tip the balance in a fight.
Accessibility
Because Crucible has a slower pace and it takes a while to take down each enemy, the victory doesn’t always go to the lone fighter who is the best shot. There’s room for players who can learn how to fit in and get a task done, like holding down a Harvester or collecting a lot of Essence. There are ways to contribute to victory that don’t involve being an awesome shot. These help with accessibility, and that’s important because Crucible is a new franchise that players haven’t heard about before.
What you won’t like
The slow pace
If you’re used to Call of Duty, you may feel that Crucible has an excruciatingly slow pace. You can land on the map, but you often have to trek far distances. Most characters have a way to speed up, but it’s on a timer. You speed up for a short time, but then you go back to moving slowly. If you’re killed, you can come back. But you have to spawn at a distance from the action. So you have to hike for a while.
Thankfully, this isn’t another Call of Duty-like game. But it also plays slower than Overwatch, and this first map doesn’t help. There are big rock formations that you have to move around to get to different key locations, and so getting to the action always takes time. I understand the slow pace requires more teamwork. You have to stick together on the map or risk getting cornered with no one able to come to your aid quickly. And since the map is circular, it can be pretty easy to get lost. That’s not great for newcomers.
It takes patience to move up the learning curve
This is one of those games that you can’t expect to learn to play in a few hours, which was all the time I had to play. It could take much longer than that, and you’ll have to keep a good eye on everything. Just like in Bleeding Edge, a similar hero-shooter game from Microsoft’s Ninja Theory studio that debuted in March, there are timers on your special abilities. If you use them, you’ll have to wait for the timer to be able to use them again. So you have to keep an eye on that. You also have to watch the terrain not only for enemies but also watch for the creatures of Crucible, as these beings represent an environmental threat to players.
You can shoot creatures, or farm them, to build up your Essence, but you might neglect to see that your enemies are capturing all of the important stations on the map. If you’re in a firefight, you have to maintain awareness of your health and use your collected health kits if you have them. If multiple enemies are on you, that health can go down surprisingly fast. And you have to keep an eye on the scoreboard, see how well the enemy team is scoring, and do something about it if you’re losing. In short, it’s easy to lose while you’re distracted or not paying attention to the right problem at the right time.
This complexity will eventually turn into an advantage once you master it. But it works against accessibility.
It takes a while to take down enemies
Crucible isn’t one of those one-shot, one-kill games. If your teammates aren’t listening to you (on something like Discord), then you won’t have much of a chance to bring down enemies. I played with Amazon developers and other game journalists, and there was constant chatter on Discord to close in on enemies and get kills. But if you don’t have that tight communication with other players, good luck in combat. It feels like if you play with friends, you can coordinate better. If not, it could be frustrating.
Repetitive gameplay and a single map
Once you feel like you’ve learned the game, you may feel like it gets repetitive. The map could definitely use more verticality, so that players can get the jump on those below. If you’re not a fan of either the gameplay or the map, then you’ll have to wait until Amazon releases more. This problem can be fixed, but it makes it feel like there just isn’t enough content at the start. If I were Amazon, and I had worked on this game for five years, I feel like it would have been better to rotate players across a few different maps, like with Overwatch at its outset.
Conclusion
I fear that this game could wind up like Bleeding Edge, which critics panned. That game got run over by other titles like Call of Duty: Warzone and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In other words, Crucible has just enough content to be a playable game, but it isn’t enough to be a blockbuster or to take on established titles like Overwatch. At least not yet.
While this game has similarities to other titles out there, it doesn’t really take down any of them by being a much better game. My only suggestion for Amazon is to accelerate its content updates so that players will feel like there’s a lot more variety. I worry that it will take a while to get good at the game, and players don’t really have that patience. Castle knows there are improvements to come.
“I’m super-excited to hear what people have to say. We’re a brand-new game studio, a brand-new game publisher,” he said. “We’ve worked on it a long time, but we’re under no delusion. We know that the minute it goes live and we have millions of people out there playing, we’re going to find out all sorts of things we didn’t think of. We’re anxious to have people do that. We’re dedicated to making sure we respond to customers.”
There are seeds of goodness here, but it doesn’t feel like there’s enough just yet to call this an outstanding game.
Score: Pending.
Amazon’s Crucible is now available on the PC as a free-to-play game.