Basement Crawl review: cutting room

It's not just unpolished, though it is filthy with technical glitches. Basement Crawl fails on a fundamental level, with flawed basic design and incredibly limited gameplay. On a surface level, it mimics the chaotic multiplayer games of the late 90s, but it barely functions.

Basement Crawl is an action-puzzle multiplayer game with a dirty, horror-inspired aesthetic. You play as one of four deranged characters — an evil teddy bear, scary clown, amputee crash test dummy in a wheelchair and a killer woman — and run around in isometric battlefields, throwing bombs at one another across corridors and around obstacles.

Each character has a special skill — And there are power-ups on the battlefield — tokens that allow you to inflict double damage with your bombs, for example. But none of these features matter much, because the action in Basement Crawl is incomprehensible.

Basement Crawl is multiplayer-only, with no tutorial. My only option was to jump online with the hope that I could adjust quickly enough to its mechanics. But Basement Crawl lends itself poorly to this approach, with a manic pace and terrible UI. Since there are only four characters, and 8 player matches necessitate at least some doubling, I often lost track of who I was controlling in the heat of battle. Every time I died and spawned on a random point of the map, I lost precious seconds trying to figure out who I was. And the onscreen indicators are useless.

Basement Crawl's isometric perspective makes for camera problems and issues with hit detection. I can't count the number of times I got caught on the edge of a box. It also makes it difficult to tell where some of the bombs are — especially in the top and bottom corners. There were also times I was sure I was on a "safe" grid, but the bomb I was supposed to be clear of still blew me to bits.