Big Crown: Showdown (Xbox One)
Big Crown: Showdown is a multiplayer game through and through, to the point you can’t even play it on your own or with computer controlled opponents, but strangely enough, the way it treats its story that only serves as a framework for the action might give the impression it was meant to have more going on.
The evil warlock Fonkin one day overthrows King Krabbit, taking his crown and his kingdom with ease partially in part because his four trusted knights were too busy sitting on the couch playing video games to stop the warlock. Still, Fonkin casts the four couch potatoes 100 years into the future to be safe, but when they arrive, they still have little interest in saving the kingdom, instead inspired by Fonkin’s new challenge where the four knights will try to clear deadly obstacle courses in the Big Crown Showdown. If this was all the game did to establish its background then it wouldn’t seem too strange, but loading screens between rounds of the showdown keeping adding little touches to the story that makes you want to see what could have been. Loading screen lines, when not making jokes or talking about controls, will do things like theorize on Fonkin’s true nature and motivations, give details of how the world changed during his reign, and give you extra background information on the locations you visit, and while a story mode would most likely just be a single-player sequence of showdown rounds if it did exist, it at least would feel like those little bits of trivia and set dressing would have some sort of payoff.
Big Crown: Showdown instead is solely about the multiplayer platforming challenges, with two to four players able to dive into the obstacle courses in a quest to rack up the most points. There are three major worlds, the medieval city of Kasseltoon, the chilly northern lands of Shivershire, and the Egyptian deserts of Zoggysands, with each of these major locations further split into five levels that all feature a unique hazard. Much of Big Crown: Showdown is focused on staying alive as the screen moves on its own, forcing you to hurry up through the stage and its deadly traps or else you’ll lose a life when you’re offscreen for too long. Running and jumping is all you really have to keep up, so the level hazards don’t need to be too complex to challenge the players. Some like the air vents try to blow you off the stage, deadly drops being the most common way of losing a life, but swinging axes can instantly kill you as well and must be avoided. Some traps require you to time your jumps right to climb aboard moving ships or rotating cogs, and some areas feature platforms that will start to crack and break based on how many times a player has jumped or stepped on them. A few hazards even exist solely to sabotage other players such as buttons dropping the platforms over long falls when pressed, but for the most part, the level moves automatically both with its screen and with its dangers, the threat from the other players mostly being that they might knock you into these hazards.
To encourage a bit more interaction with your enemies, all the knights feature an offensive and defensive option. Knights can throw wimpy punches with a simple button tap, but these don’t really do much besides help break you free of a four player cluster or potentially knock an enemy over the edge when they’re already teetering on it. Instead, you’ll most often need to use your charge punch if you want to get aggressive. When fully charged your character will slow down and be unable to jump, but if you hit an opponent with the blow, they’ll go flying, most often off the edge of the level. Besides just avoiding charge punches with good movement though, players also pack shields they can pull up, the impact of a charge punch dampened if the shield is up but proper timing on raising it required to pull off a deflection, the force of the blow bouncing back to launch the perpetrator away instead. When you’re introduced to the game, these may seem sufficient for a hectic party game, but once players learn their options for battle, Big Crown: Showdown quickly loses its luster. It becomes all too easy to see a charge punch coming and ready yourself to deflect it or just get ahead of it, and the risk to reward ratio for trying to get aggressive isn’t really all that well-tuned.
To earn points in a round of Big Crown: Showdown there are a few options. The simplest one is just getting to the end of the obstacle course level designs, the player getting points equal to how many lives they had at the end, although you can also end a level early if you’re the last one standing once other players have lost all of theirs. The other way you can earn points is by killing your fellow knights, knocking them to their doom potentially earning you a point… so long as one of the many things that can sabotage earning that point doesn’t take place. You might punch an enemy over the side, but if they skim off a separate platform or a piece of the level design before dropping, you might not get a point. If you shield their attack and it’s not a full on deflection despite pushing them to their doom, you won’t get the point. If you hit an enemy into a stage hazard, pretty much the intended means of using these otherwise often easily avoidable obstacles, the game might not count it as your kill since the level did the work. While certain levels are more conducive to getting reliable points for attacking foes or might have spots great for harassing the other knights, the fact the scoring system is somewhat unreliable makes getting aggressive more dangerous, as you may lose your life in an attempt to earn a point that might not even register properly. You are still in effect robbing the opponent of a point technically by killing them, but there are some stages where it ends up better to just avoid conflict save for choke point moments. Four player chaos does make it more likely you can’t avoid conflict so easily, but once one player is out or if you’re playing with few to start, it can be quite easy for things to slip into progressing through the levels normally while keeping your distance from each other.
There are a few options you can customize to try and make things more interesting or force a bit more aggression from the players. Custom Matches will allow you to set the point total needed to win the game. Normally stages will be randomly picked and continue in a chain until someone wins, but Custom Match mode allows you to set which stages you want to loop to possibly put in the more exciting or conflict-encouraging ones instead of the likes of the level with very mild water currents or the crushers that you can easily avoid by walking across their edges. The better modifiers though have to be the settings for screen speed and player strength. By making even the normal punches a little tougher, it can be easier to justify going in and attacking, especially since you don’t have to execute a charge punch to get a kill necessarily. The screen speed can also be upped to make things more frantic, it ending up much harder to wait in safety when you’re constantly pushed forward and through hazards, although slowing down the screen can also lead to an increase in fighting since otherwise it would just be way too dull to sit and wait out the gradual screen movement without engaging with the other players. There is also a feature where the player who won the previous round will wear the crown at the start of the next, players able to get extra points if they kill him… but only for the first life. This of course hits the problem with point detection, but it can at least inspire some early interaction.
The final attempt to try and inject a bit more competitiveness into the game once its basics are learned is through treasure chests. The stage designs of all the levels are set in stone and easy to learn, meaning you will eventually know to anticipate hazards and overcome them well, but treasure chests are placed throughout them to encourage some immediate competition for the contents. To get the unlockable costumes, players will need to make sure they’re the one scooping up the coins found in these chests, the chest taking a bit to break open and the coins spraying out to send players scrambling. A treasure chest skirmish may take a life from a player or two at most though, mainly because the respawn method is flying in with balloons to rejoin the battle and the brief invincibility after a respawn means they can’t be fought for a second. They’ll either pop right back in to take the coins or arrive too late to contribute to the treasure fight after dying, but at least having a focal point for some action in a few spots of the level can inject some aggression into a game that needed to find a way to make it a more regular feature.
THE VERDICT: Big Crown: Showdown is a game that shrivels up fast. Once you learn the basics of the combat, the traps of the few short levels on offer, and the flaws with earning points for eliminating other players, what could be a chaotic rush through obstacle courses where players are constantly trying to kill each other can quickly become too tame and safe. Risking your life with a charge punch that can be easily countered with the shield loses its luster, action only really picking up at choke points or treasure chests and even then feeling a bit too simple to excite much. The obstacle courses are ultimately not dangerous enough to really keep you on your toes, and with the multiplayer sabotage aspect not paying off as well as it should even if you try to customize a match to encourage it, Big Crown: Showdown becomes dull a little too quick.
And so, I give Big Crown: Showdown for Xbox One…
A BAD rating. It’s fairly easy to identify a few tweaks that could help Big Crown: Showdown out with its longevity problem. More ruthless obstacle course designs could allow for more moments where a player might flub the platforming or see opportunity to sabotage the opponents, and a bit of randomness to layouts could overcome the inevitable memorization issues. Giving the knights another viable combat options besides the skewed relationship between charge punches and shields could make for more exciting or justifiable skirmishes. A point system that was less picky about what counts as an elimination or one that ignored lives in favor of kills would encourage you to charge in and risk your own skin to try and earn the higher score. Sadly, Big Crown: Showdown is a little slim when it comes to content even when you factor in the Custom Matches that can accommodate some of the flaws like discouraged aggression. Those moments where the game tries to get you fighting with a thin platform or a treasure chest don’t often last long enough to really spice up the levels as much as is needed to make the multiplayer battles engaging.
Big Crown: Showdown does at least start off with a brief honeymoon period where players are learning the ropes together, unless of course a player who knows the game swings in for an easy win. Big Crown: Showdown is perhaps just a little too reserved in order to try to keep everyone in the game, the inevitable chaos of having powerful options or constant threats definitely favoring a more skilled player rather than leading to the fracas the developers were probably hoping for. However, the chaos really doesn’t have the ground to grow on because both the stages and the characters lack the teeth to really make the battles exciting once you’ve seen their limits. With proper incentives to be more active, Big Crown: Showdown could have been a multiplayer gamer worth more than just a small taste.