Crash Commando

January 7,2009 - Squeaking through the gates at the end of 2008 was Crash Commando, the last PlayStation Network game from Sony to round out the year. Crash Commando takes the fast shooter action of your typical multiplayer first-person shooter and squeezes it into a 2D side-scrolling format to make for a surprisingly fun experience. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise since the developers, EPOS Game Studios, were founded by two of the founders of DICE, so their pedigree of fun multiplayer games seems to have carried over to Crash Commando.


Crash Commando’s concept is pretty simple. It’s a side-scrolling shooter, influenced by a computer game called Soldat, which was made exclusively for multiplayer. Aiming is freed by a simple 360-degree rotation of the right analog stick, with your typical types of guns and grenades causing satisfying explosions of blood whenever you make killing blows. You can get around each level easily with the jeep, tank, and standard issue jetpack to help you get an advantage over your opponents. The interesting part of the levels is that there are two sides to each level that you can switch between by finding a tunnel to the other side with special turrets that can shoot between enemies on the opposing side. If it seems like a simple game, that’s because it really is simple and is a concise, fun experience.

Crash Commando offers two main modes, Boot Camp and Multiplayer. Boot Camp is a series of matches with bots that give you goals of killing a certain amount of bots before time runs out. These are divided up into easy and hard challenges, eight each for sixteen total matches, and the bots do a good job of acting like real players to give you a good, fun offline experience. The main reason for the Boot Camp challenges is to get acclimated to the game and controls along with trying to earn all sixteen Commando Medals, which you earn by playing well enough to earn 1,000 points in a challenge. It’s not too hard to just get through all Boot Camp challenges and then get the Commando Medals, so the appeal lies mainly with creating your own bot matches or the multiplayer mode.

Multiplayer in Crash Commando, unfortunately, is strictly an online affair as there are no splitscreen options right now, though that could change with patches and updates. The game is pretty simple with its online options, too, as you have the choice of the deathmatch, team deathmatch, or objective mode, the latter places one team on offense to destroy consoles or steal data from the other team’s base depending on the map. Four maps are included with the game and each map can hold up to 12 players, which is just about right for the size of the maps. The game browser is fine enough, offering the ability to employ a simple custom search for game types that you want, but it definitely could use a bit of an overhaul in a future update.

While Crash Commando’s multiplayer offers a lot of fun, we did find a fairly big issue when we first tried out the game, which is that we couldn’t get into a game at all. The results of trying to join a game were that we either got a communication error or it seemed that everybody else was logged off if we actually got into a game, which seemed to that games that were nearly full would cause these issues while nearly empty games work fine. There have not been any issues with the many other multiplayer games over PSN for us, so it seems odd that Crash Commando is the pickiest game so far. Just chalk that up to another thing that EPOS needs to take a look at for future updates to Crash Commando.


If there’s one way to describe the visuals of Crash Commando, it’s that it seems to be similar to the way Bionic Commando: Rearmed looks. That sleek 2.5D look really works well for Crash Commando and fits in with the rest of the game’s over-the-top gameplay and gore. The game runs very smoothly though load times for online or offline matches can be a bit on the long side. The maps looks very nice, though there isn’t that much variety between the four available, with maybe just the volcano map as the only one that sticks out. The soundtrack consists mainly of your typical military-style music, which fits the game well, and the sound effects are nice and over-the-top, like the rest of the game.

Crash Commando is a surprisingly fun shooter that should please multiplayer fans that want something light and easy to pick up. The game definitely has some issues that can be fixed with updates and maybe DLC if EPOS really thinks the community would pay for more maps and modes. For $10, this is probably one of the best multiplayer experiences that you’ll get out of the PSN lineup until maybe Fat Princess comes out later this year. At least it seems like the community will stick around for quite a bit longer than they did for the last great multiplayer PSN game, Calling All Cars.

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