Crosak

If you suffer from metropolitan melancholy, Crosak could be the antidote. Living in a cave with a mate and Bambo the cave baby, the only crowds you’d see would be a swarm of pterodactyls. It’s enough to bring a tear to David Attenborough’s eye.

Crosak is a prehistoric platformer, even though it tries to position itself as a dino deathmatch. It consists of three levels of platforming action and three boss fights.

The former has you running from left to right in traditional fashion, whacking dinosaurs and cavemen as they rush onto the screen. The 3D rendered environments you run through are pretty enough, too, although the actual gameplay is 2D all the way.

You play using a virtual D-pad and set of buttons at the bottom of the screen, your left thumb moving your club-wielding barbarian about while the right thumb takes care of whacking and jumping.

It’s all so terribly pedestrian, though. Platform stages are a matter of cementing your thumb on the ‘right’ button, then intermittently jabbing away at the 'attack' button, with the occasional press of the 'jump' button whenever a chasm crops up. There are no vertical platforms, at all. Apparently the world was flat back in the day.

The only bit of spark is the ability to fill up a power bar by whacking a certain number of dinosaurs, which gives you a mammoth’s leg super attack. Since there are only ever up to two enemies on screen at once, both of which can easily be done away with using a single swipe of your club, it’s spectacularly pointless.

Okay, so then there are the boss levels. The first is quite refreshing: a battle against a beaked dino as it tries to peck you into oblivion. There’s a spot of dodging as it jabs away until it predictably gets its beak stuck in the ground and you can move in for the strike - nothing new, sure, but at least it’s different from the platforming monotony.

Unfortunately, any hope that Crosak improves with progress crumbles upon the realisation that all the levels are basically the same. Sure, they look different and are set in different environments, but the second platform level is much like the first, and the second boss is much like the first.

Calling itself 'Crosak Deathmatch' and allowing you to submit your scores to the web, Crosak seems to be trying to make out that it’s something it’s not - presumably because it singularly fails to be a good example of what it actually is.

Crosak isn’t imaginative or different enough to be truly terrible, but having pitched its marquee far into mediocrity, there‘s no real reason to give it a look.