Flashbang : Crunchball 3000

Welcome back to Flashbang after my unannounced break. I’ve been scouring the interwebs in search of great Flash games to bring you kind folks, and I thank you for your patience. First up is a little futuristic sports game.

Ben Olding Games brings us Crunchball 3000, a kind of lacrosse, rugby, soccer mash up set in the future. You have a team of 10 players and the objective is to score points either by throwing or running the ball into the goal. Winning games earns you money which can be used to train your team in different areas like speed, throwing, hitting, and passing. (For what it’s worth, I never bother to train passing – the game just moves too fast to make it very useful) You start out in Division 4, the bottom of the totem pole. Once you learn how to play a little and you win that division, you move up to 3, then 2, then 1, where winning makes you the world champion. (I’ve been playing for a long while now and still haven’t finished the thing)

Aside from regular training, which only improves the skills of a few players, you can also buy team wide equipment upgrades, improving the same stats as the training, but for the entire team rather than just a few players. In addition, at the end of every season, you have the opportunity to trade contracts with other teams, essentially you spend money for more skilled players and you gain money for less skilled players. If you have the money, this is by far the fastest way to improve your team.

The game play itself is excellent. G and H shoot and pass, J changes your team’s formation, you move with WASD. As you get to the higher divisions, your formation becomes increasingly important. The opponents are faster and stronger and if you don’t have your team positioned to stop them, they will waltz in and score at will. I have some lag problems playing at work, but at home the game zips right along. A minimap at the top right shows you the whole field, letting you know ahead of time just how out of position you or your opponent have become. The speed of the game makes this tough to use all the time, but when you can spare a glance up there, you can break out in a one on one with the goalie, which is always a good thing. The only break in the action comes courtesy of a bug that crashes Flash. An error box pops up and you are forced to stop scripts on the page, reload, and start over on the current game. I’d say it happens at least once every time I play, but that could be due to the fact that once I start, I don’t really quit until I hit the bug once or twice.

The graphics are solid, not spectacular. My biggest issue is that in a large clump of players, the blue circle underneath my player sometimes leads me to believe that I have the ball when I don’t. This is a personal thing, though, and you may have no issue at all. Perhaps an empty ring when you control a player without the ball and the solid circle when you do have the ball. Like I said, it’s a small thing.

I have always been a sucker for a decent sports game that allows me to play season to season and improve my team. Crunchball 3000 does both admirably. The real killer is the difficulty. I have been playing for a few weeks now and still haven’t won. Perhaps I’m just lousy at the game, but I prefer to think that it’s actually a challenge. Losing as much as I do and still being driven to come back and play more says a lot about the overall fun of the game. I’m going to give Crunchball 3000 a solid 9. If that script error wasn’t there, this would be our first Flashbang 10. Now, back to Division 2…