Crymachina (PlayStation 5) Review

CRYMACHINA perhaps did not set off on the best foot for its early advertising. What often appeared as translations errors such as weird phrases like 'humans should live in a cool way' discounts what is actually a surprising hit from developer FuRyu. Perhaps most recognized for their game Crystar many of the aspects of that game are found here. This game focuses on much the same of dark themes, life and death, and the importance of family.

From the very beginning it is clear FuRyu put a lot more time and money into this. There is an absolutely cool and dark anime opening that sets the mysterious stage of the player taking the role of a robot girl waking up on a space station above a dead Earth. At the beginning of the story humanity has been killed, and as a last-ditch effort, designed AIs and sent them into space with the hope of figuring out how to restart the human race.

Players take the role of these girls slowing learning who they are in their quest to become more human and what that ultimately means, leaving their robot personalities behind. Along the way expect a slew of sci-fi concepts thrown at the player from talking about the existence of aliens, the Fermi Paradox, 'the dark forest' and simulation theory etc. As a sci-fi fan hearing about this stuff in a game is really rewarding and it is novel ground for games to cover.

Gameplay has come a long way from its Crystar days. It is an action RPG where players can dash around unleashing combos on enemies in flashy, fluid combat. There are different 'drone' sub-weapons players can equip that change from firing lasers, to sword strikes as well as distractions. Lastly, players can pull out a ranged weapon to shoot enemies down. It is a fairly smooth, fast and largely decent affair for being their first time with such a system, it really makes the future look bright for this developer. Some things stand out as small issues though such as that every level is mostly just a straight hallway to a boss.

There are some complaints about the battle system. One is some of the attacks generally don't work, and another is how random combat can be. First, combat is very fast, and while characters have a 'charge up' attack, it takes way too long to use and as a result the only thing players will be doing is the basic attack the whole game. It still is fun simply because how fast combat is, and dashing around makes it feel vibrant. One of the frustrations though, is for whatever reason some attacks hit very, very hard, even a regular enemy will randomly kill you in one to two attacks. What this means is bashing your way through a slew of enemies, suddenly you end up dead on the ground with only the Game Over screen as a clue what happened.

Story-wise it has both some very good highs and some middling lows. The story starts off on a good clip with the main girl trying to figure out where she is, what happened to humanity and so on. Part of the problem is much of this story is told over tea time as the girls sit there in luxury, waxing philosophic about the problems of the world. Often times the tonal dissonance is hard to swallow, someone might have just been killed and now they are talking over tea about this or that. Besides this though, the story drags a little in the middle, such that it almost was enough to want to stop, but then some huge plot reveals happen that really make the player think about everything up until that point. The game clocks in at around 20 hours, but it really should have been shorter by about five. A lot of the dragging serves to only drag down what otherwise could be a pretty brisk narrative.

One of the other issues is the stat system is mind-blowing obtuse. There are multiple different stats to level up, and even the tool tips are vague with things like 'helpful against higher level enemies'. The two drones that fight alongside the player are another example of a system that might be cool, but there is again zero explanation from how the stats work, to various chips that can be equipped into them. Even something as simple as how strong the attack is, is hard to figure out as at least two different stats make reference to it. So when a new weapon comes along and there is huge red down arrows on some stats and green on others, is it really better? Perhaps the girls should be philosophizing on this instead.

CRYMACHINA is mostly firing on all cylinders, and really makes any future games from FuRyu something to watch for. There are some tedious sections to the story, and random small complaints such as the stat system being incomprehensible, or a little too much yuri tea time... but overall, some of the concepts the game brings up are pretty cool. Story-wise when it gets good is really good, the only problem is sometimes there is some rough parts to get to it and a lot of meaningless talk between.