Amazon Studio's first major title is a free-to-play 3rd-person hero shooter called Crucible. Crucible is a unique mix of styles and ideas that don't fit clearly into any conventional genre. While the learning curve is remarkably steep, players that invest the time will find an exciting team-focused shooter starring a unique cast of characters. Unfortunately, Crucible has too many questionable design decisions and missing features in its current form.
A Truly Mixed Bag
This Crucible review has been one of the hardest for me to write because for each of the many things I find frustrating about it, there's something else I'm really impressed by. Amazon Studios clearly has a talented and experienced team working on the game and it shows, especially in the character design, cosmetic items, and microtransactions.
We can't talk about a F2P game without digging into the way it's monetized, and in this case, I have nothing but compliments. The pre-season battle pass is free to all players that start before June 1st and it's packed with worthwhile rewards to pursue. The character skins and drop pods are largely diverse, rivaling Overwatch in quality cosmetics at launch. There are no pay-to-win options; all in-app purchases are purely cosmetic and, more importantly, worthwhile. I've got my eye on a few in the battle pass that I'm tempted to grind for and all my friends I play with are equally excited about pursuing their own favorite cosmetic item.
Most of the characters are incredibly unique and beautifully animated. There's an impressive level of cohesion between the character design, voice, dialogue, and hero kit. Almost all of them are fully-realized, memorable characters.]
While the level of polish on the characters is self-evident, the same can not be said of the game itself. There's a large number of missing features that give the game an Early Access feel. There is no in-game chat via voice or text. There's no scoreboard or, perhaps most crucially, no mini-map, and no way to know if these things are coming because there's no road map. In-game readability is incredibly poor. It's difficult to track objectives as well as other players and a lot of the UI looks like temporary graphics.
Currently, there are three game modes available: a 4v4 mode where two teams compete to kill bosses and collect their hearts called Heart of the Hives, a 16-player battle royale mode called Alpha Hunters, and an 8v8 arcade mode called Harvester Command. While Alpha Hunters offers some high stakes compelling gameplay and Harvester Command is fun for some mindless action, Heart of the Hives is the default game mode and the one I have the most problems with.
An Unsuccessful Main Game Mode
Heart of the Hives pits two teams of four in a race to kill big dangerous boss monsters called Hives and collect their hearts. The first team to collect three hearts wins, but Hives appear in the world one by one and with five minutes in between each one. In the between time, there are control points called harvesters to fight over, as they provide additional team XP (leveling up provides new abilities and increased power ala Heroes of the Storm) and collection of occasional bonus objectives like over shields and health boosts. On paper, it sounds like fertile ground for clever teamwork and exciting team fights. Unfortunately, it doesn't really come together in a satisfying way.
For one thing, the map is way too big and difficult to navigate. When a teammate dies in a traditional MOBA, it is detrimental to the team because of the respawn time as well as the time to catch up. The time to catch up in Crucible can be excruciating depending on the character and the lack of a mini-map and confusing level design makes it even worse.
Teams spawn on either side of the map and start the round by capturing harvesters. The time between capturing harvesters and collapsing on the next hive is often quite long with nothing to do but wander around killing any camps you discover or accidentally run into the enemy. If your team isn't there for the fight, they will almost never get there in time. There is no mount mechanic. Making it worse, there's no way to communicate with your team other than to ping and it isn't clear at all what objectives players can or should pursue. The learning curve is particularly high and the temptation to wander off and just kill camps when you don't know what else to do is high. Frankly, that's all there is to do a lot of the time, so when it comes time to kill the hive or fight the other team, you can hardly blame the people that are too far away to help.
It's a hotly debated topic, but it seems fairly obvious that characters are poorly balanced right now. In a review that doesn't change, it feels a bit unfair to talk about something that will change a lot in the game (I assume), but it doesn't help with first impressions when a handful of characters get in, deal high damage, and escape, and other characters can only do one of those things well.
Most critically though, the game is almost completely devoid of any hard CC. Half of the characters have an ability that can slow, but there is practically no way to peel damage. Most fights eventually resort to frustrating chases across the map to finish off high mobility characters.
So Much Promise
And yet, I'm having a lot of fun playing with my group. The characters are just so interesting and unique, even within the hero shooter genre. Heart of the Hives is not a strong game mode and it's a shame Crucible is leading with that, but there's always a chance they'll pull a Fortnite: Save The World and take the best parts of an unpopular game and turn it into something great.
Games like Crucible are born when they release and, with the help of a player base, live long complex lives. I'd like to see Crucible stick around for a while because I think the characters and combat have a lot of potential. It's underdeveloped right now, certainly, but it's got a strong core and I'll certainly be keeping an eye on in the coming months.
A PC copy of Crucible was used by TheGamer for this review. Crucible is free to play right now on PC.
Crucible