Genre: 3D / Beat'em Up CDs: 1 (272 Megs) Players: 1 ESRB: Mature
 Animated Violence
Animated Blood
Publisher: Acclaim Retail Barcode: 0 21481 21072 6 Memory: Password
Developer: Grey Matter Sony ID: SLUS-00242 Accessories: None
Released: February 26, 1997 PSRM: 003150


Box Copy
3D fighting with a vengeance

They killed you. But you came back. An avenging angel from beyond the grave. A vigilante reborn to bring justice to the damned. Take your unearthly powers and wreak vengeance on Judah, L.A.’s drug king, Kali, the nin-jitsu death-bitch, Curve, Spider Monkey and an army of lowlife thugs…because life after death is hell.

Discussion
There is no way to fully understand the severity of much this game defies logic. From the moment you start the game, warning signs begin going off that keep telling you not to play it and keeps beating it into you. I didn’t listen, and now I am here to tell you the tale.

Based off of the movie it’s name after, The Crow is essentially a side-scrolling beat’em up trapped in a horrific Resident Evil engine gone horribly wrong. The problem is that not a single element of the individual parts was finalized with any sort of care.

Presenting itself first and foremost are the poorly rendered levels that you’ll be crawling across. There are, at any given time, only 4 colors on screen: black, brown, yellow, and red. That’s it…with black being the most prevalent. There is no vibrancy to the game at all, let alone the ability to actually see anything in the background. Worse still, the designers decided to add in more camera angles than were remotely needed. Such foolery results in too-often pauses, off-screen characters, poor viewing angle, and my personal favorite – lack of depth.

You see, rather than just keep things simple, Grey Matter decided that you should move and fight as if you were playing Tekken; that is, though you’re walking in 3D you will auto-lock onto an enemy. This lock-on causes a plane-shift, and you duel as if you were the only two in the room. There is no way to escape this lock without first beating the enemy, causing you to die at the hands of any enemy that was actually smart enough to come in behind you. Worse still, the clipping and damage boxes that determine where your moves hit are practically non-existent. I spent half the game trying to move incrementally back and forth pleading for anything to just hit the bastard I was fighting against.

The voice-over work and music are 100% forgettable and unacceptable. Every music track is roughly 20 seconds of the same repeating loop, and if it does change, it’s atrocious. Late in the game, enemy voice-overs were even assigned correctly; a male and female voice were swapped or opponents called out the wrong threat associated to their weapon (a knife wielder screamed, “Eat lead!”). Boss characters have absolutely no rhyme or reason to their patterns. When fighting said monstrosities, Ashe will suddenly have extra moves that he couldn’t use on regular foes. I couldn’t tell you what they were – the same move came out no matter what I pressed. Unless you use a GameShark code for Infinite Health like I did, be prepared to die instantly with no chance to retaliate. Enemies can come pre-equipped with shotguns and missile launchers that will kill you almost instantly. Curve, the 2nd in command, has a rocket-launching guitar. I shit you not.

All of this ends up as one giant ass piece of crap, an absolute abomination of development time, and several hours of my life I will never, ever get back. Out of the 1200+ games released on the PlayStation, this ranks as one of the top 10 Worst Games of all time, hands down.

Which is something to crow about.
 		 Trivia
  • The only Crow movie or related media to be released as a video game.
     
  • If you, for whatever reason, need to play this game, here's a lone game play tip to save yourself wasted time: In the church level, you'll have to cross three chandeliers - you'll auto jump to the first one, and then at the very end of the swing, just press forward, then do it again. Anything other than that will cause you to drop, and if you drop three times, it's game over.
     
  • There are glitches all over the game, the best of the, being an audio clip that was improperly recorded - resulting the an ear piercing, eye-popping buzzer noise. It's supposed to be there, just not at that level.
     
  • There are no credits when you finish the game...those you can view at the Title Screen. It's as if the developers knew no one...but me...would actually play through it.
     
  • PlayStation's version features some extra passwords that were not featured in the Saturn version.
     
  • Most of the cinematic movies are noticeably rushed - the characters race through their lines, and there's minimal movement in all of them sans the bookend movies.


 
Variants / Misprints
There are no variants yet for this game. 		 
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