Krinkle Krusher (PlayStation 4) Review

As the story goes, everyone in the kingdom is celebrating, eating cake made with fruit from an ancient magical tree, but the smell attracts dangerous creatures known as Krinkles. The town asks a mage and his magic glove to defend the gate and, thus, the adventure begins. Krinkle Krusher's premise is simple: stop the enemies from reaching the wall by using magic rings to cast spells.

The glove is controlled using the analogue sticks, moving vertically and horizontally. To begin with, there is just one spell offered and a small trickle of enemies, which provides a good starting difficulty for learning this rather unusual system, but it quickly becomes pretty tough - perhaps a little too hard - when the spells are limited. Each enemy has a specific weakness to an incantation, which means that it can be played strategically. The biggest problem faced is that the levels become repetitive fast - waves of enemies, limited spells (to start with), and no real way to just block foes in order to catch a breath, meaning very short bursts of play are the best way to enjoy this.

The presentation is somewhat poor on the nice, shiny PS4, disappointingly, with all textures being of a low resolution, models that are low in polygon count, and stunted animation. However, the visuals are very colourful during both story and gameplay, with the story itself presented as images with occasional animations that look decent enough and don't overstay their welcome. The sound, on the other hand, is not so forgivable. Those at the helm will have "Krinkle-tastic" drilled into their subconscious due to the Persona 4 Teddy-type voice that presents humorous quips, which is a shame as it makes it hard to focus on the actual playing of the game. Thankfully, the rest of the sound is pretty good, with some decent music and reasonably polished voice acting.

Krinkle Krusher has a reasonable length, with three worlds each containing 20 levels and there is some added replayability due to levels later on being free for replay with new powers in order to achieve the highest rank of three stars. It feels as though the PS4 port was just a quick way to grab at a larger audience, though, having the feel of a handheld product and probably would be more enjoyable on Vita. A touch-screen would remove the tedious analogue movement, at least, and provide a much more quick-fire gameplay environment.