Coffee Crisis

Review

Oh my God . . . what are we going to do? They have landed! It’s the Smurglian, the Alien race we heard about all over the news yesterday. If our scientists are right, they are here to steal one specific genre of music, heavy metal (which is kind of ok, because I personally prefer a good funky track). They also want to steal our WIFI; how on earth are we going to get our information, or play our favourite game at night? But what gets me the most is that they want to take our entire supply of coffee beans, and THAT, I can neither comprehend nor allow.  The only people who can help us to save the world and its coffee beans are the true baristas. The world is plunged into a deep crisis. . . . The Coffee Crisis!

Coffee Crisis is an arcade / beat’em up / action game where you take control of one of two baristas available to you in a single player mode, or play with a mate in a frantic local co-op mode.

Here you are coffee-lovers, you have to choose between two of the best baristas in the world to make sure the evil Smurglian fail in their attempt. Let me introduce our heroes; we have Nick, who is one of those strong men who can carry several bags of coffee beans on his shoulders, and Ashley, who is extremely agile with her percolator (stove-top coffee maker)!

After choosing your character, you’ll start the fight in a coffee shop. The interesting thing is that the coffee crisis is using random modifiers throughout each of your attempts. These modifiers can either help or disadvantage you during each of your plays. So expect that every new game will be different, which is extremely good in terms of re-playability.

The game has ten levels to complete and they are divided into a couple of categories. For example, when you start a new game, the first fight is in the coffee shop. In this type of level, you have to eliminate all the aliens within a confined area. When you’ve done this, a blue portal will appear to teleport your character to the next level, which will be a scrolling style.  Enemies will come from the right or the left of your screen and you’ll have to continually move forward and kill them until you reach the next portal. In these levels, you will be able to destroy a few things, such as crates, phone booths and more. They usually have some goodies to help your characters within the level. After destroying them, you might get a donut or a pot of coffee, which will regenerate your health when you hover over them. You might even get a blue coffee bag (hit multiplayer), a yellow bag with an “I” on it and you’ll become invisible for 30 seconds, or even a golden coffee bag, which will give you an extra life. The other way to get an extra life is when you reach every thousand points or win the coffee stand-off against the other barista. These stand-offs will occur after you successfully finish a scrolling level (so to speak).

The gameplay is fairly simple; your character will have a both a normal and a special attack, and can jump around to avoid enemies. There are several types of common enemies: the green aliens will come towards you and attempt to head-butt you, while the blue aliens will throw projectiles at you.  The aliens will take control of the weakest and the strongest humans around. The grannies with their walking frames as well as the grandpa’s with their canes will come at you from everywhere. Beware of the bouncers and cow girls who are so much stronger than the elders and can be tricky to take out. The enemies you need to be really careful off are the ones with a donut (health) over their heads – boy, those ones are hard to eliminate!

Within the scrolling level, you’ll have to fight three strong waves of enemies. First, the frame will be locked and you character will not be able to move forward or backward. The second is that you might experience a different look at this specific time. For example, the screen (mutators) become like a broken mirror, the background might be all white and you’ll only be able to see the outline of each of the characters, including your own, which can make them really hard to locate. There are others, but I’ll let you discover them!

Graphically, the game looks great - I really enjoy this type of retro game! The soundtrack, as you would expect, is based around heavy metal music and suits the game very well. In terms of the controls, they are fine and responsive.  All in all, the game is great, although it can be frustrating at times as it is quite hardcore. Definitely worth playing.