The Haunted Hoard: Creepy Road (PC)

One of the things Creepy Road puts front and center might also be one of its strangest aspects, as the protagonist Flint Trucker certainly isn’t what he seems. Depicted with pretty standard trucker attire, his exaggerated features, especially his enormous teeth, make him seem, quite appropriately, creepy. If he was a regular enemy in this run and gun platformer you’d probably not bat an eye at his design, but instead he’s not only the hero of this adventure, but one the game takes great lengths to depict as an all-around okay guy. He’s friendly albeit goofy and sometimes juvenile, and while he spends the entire game gunning down people and animals, he’s rarely depicted as some gun-toting badass.

 

Flint’s appearance may just be a factor of the demented art style used for the game. Even when it’s depicting a night setting or gritty location, Creepy Road uses bold colors for its cartoon art style, the hand drawn character sprites and backgrounds making any single moment lifted from Creepy Road look great, even if the sometimes deliberately grotesque character designs keep it from being described more cleanly as beautiful. Character designs and expressions are definitely exaggerated to their benefit though, and they all fit with the situation the plot sets up. While Flint Trucker was out of town on a delivery, a strange gas was released that turned all the people and animals in and around town crazy, essentially becoming zombies in all but name. Those driven insane are quick to attack anyone they see, and Flint worries his girlfriend Angelina will be caught up in the mayhem, setting off to shoot his way through the crazed hordes to save her.

The corruptive influence of the gas is responsible for the grey faces, twisted grins, and bulging eyes of your enemies, and when it comes to enemy variety, Creepy Road has it in spades. You begin your adventure pushing through a forest filled with mutated feral hogs and unicycle riding bears, face down farmers with shotguns and seagulls that drop swordfish, you enter the city and find selfie-stick wielding socialities backed up by police men and vagrants, and near the end you even begin encountering the supernatural with things like skeletons and demons entering the picture. While you will see enemies crop up in later levels such as the mad rabbits that rely on appearing in great numbers to damage you or the firebreathers who get a demonic makeover, Creepy Road mostly keeps pushing you forward through new area appropriate enemies. Some like the cows with machine gun udders perhaps stick around beyond where they should be expected to be found, but others like the divebombing pandas and clowns manage to work themselves back in without feeling like they’re breaking the theme of the area. New enemy types often bring with them new attack styles too. Early enemies slowly approach to smack you, but soon they’ll get guns and other ranged attacks, and even the melee-focused foes will change their approach or aggressiveness to feel distinct. Some come in from the sky, some stand their ground, others rely on overwhelming numbers but some have the defense needed to be a threat on their own. Considering the time needed to make all the hand-drawn visuals, the devotion to enemy variety is certainly commendable.

 

Sadly, enemy variety and enemy use are two different beasts. There are plenty of problems with how Creepy Road deploys its insane opposition, but one of the first ones probably just ties into bombarding the player with them at certain points. All the action is limited to a 2D plane, and while some levels have vertical segments, there are often points you’ll be locked in with a constantly replenishing group of enemies, needing to clear all of them before the screen will let you move on. Enemies can sometimes start attacking you while off screen here or may even hide out of view to avoid your gun fire, but the more troublesome issue is the space you have to stand. When later enemies start tossing out things like molotov cocktails, you will find your health bar that can otherwise suffer a few attacks draining almost instantly, and with the option for dodging fire often being to rush into an enemy crowd, you’re left making a tough call that will likely lead to your death either way. Enemies clumping up also means it can be hard to deal with the ones who do need to be killed first. Your shots often have a bit of a stun effect depending on the weapon, and with things like the cows with gatling gun udders, if they have time to get revved up, they’ll deal out a lot of damage that you no longer have a way of properly avoiding. Flying enemies like the seagulls don’t seem too bad until they’re coupled with these situations, where jumping is your way to avoid damage but you instead crash into the birds as you try to avoid the ground troops. There is usually at least one checkpoint to a level and usually after or before a tough area the game will put health and ammo, but there are also instant kill hazards and explosions to watch out for that lead to further unfortunate situations.

Learning the level by dying a few times will help you overcome them eventually, and since its pretty easy to get right back in the action it isn’t impossible to push forward. There are a few problem areas even when you approach situations carefully or with the knowledge of what you’ll face, and that would be the moments you need to either go up a screen or down one. A drop or a climb can often lead to jumping into enemies you can’t see yet, and even with the foreknowledge of their presence to help, you’re still diving into a hotbed of angry enemies you can’t kill quickly enough to guarantee you won’t get hurt. Bosses have a strange difficulty to them as well. The first one is almost too easy, but the weird ones like the mech-driving koala and overweight superhero all require you to learn their pattern and fire on them only during a brief window of vulnerability. These can be hard fought battles with many failures as you figure out the timing, requiring true memorization to finally overcome and the satisfaction in beating them coming in part from mastering them so thoroughly but also being free of their slow fight designs. They have repetitive audio cues as well that, while serving a function to identifying their upcoming attacks, also repeat the same few jokes far too many times, but without the sound cues they might be harder to handle. There is an odd glitch in the penultimate boss battle though where you need at least 200 shotgun shells to handle them effectively but sometimes the pick up gives you 100 instead, but bosses can be restarted easily so there at least is a work around for this unintended problem. In fact, boss difficulty can be worked around a bit too, but only if you pick Easy mode. Unfortunately, higher difficulties just make the bosses longer instead of more interesting, and Easy mode does fix a few the game’s balancing issues a tiny bit. Normally it’s wise to leave difficulty selection to the player, but to avoid obnoxious tedium, I’d probably recommend it even over Normal mode.

 

One thing that is somewhat done well though are the weapons in Creepy Road. You begin with a pistol with infinite ammo, but levels are happy to dish out the stronger armaments so it quickly becomes a backup only required for the most trigger happy players. The shotgun is the most common and well fed weapon, puffing out a strong short range burst that can take out most enemies in a few hits. Flint Trucker has a goofy line to go with each weapon he finds, and it’s not hard to agree with his love for weapons like the machine gun that pack deadly long range shots. While the flamethrower seems to have a small issue with hit detection for its fire, you can also find weapons that are almost too effective, the laser piercing through enemies with ease and the rocket launcher blowing whatever it hits away. The weirdest and perhaps best weapon might be the sci-fi ray gun that turns foes into excrement though, a guaranteed kill on any thing it hits. Weapons and ammo are removed at the end of a level, so there’s no need to hold onto the good stuff for fear of wasting them either, and with grenades and molotov cocktails always an option for explosive long range damage, you can even experiment with some stranger picks like the metal glove that fires short range energy fists if you like. If enemies weren’t so often bunched up or placed in odd spots, the weapons could really find their footing, but even packing such power, they can’t overcome the issues born from the game’s overall poor design.

THE VERDICT: Looks can be deceiving when it comes to Creepy Road. The exaggerated cartoon look, enemy designs, and powerful weapons would all be great in some other game, but they are shackled here to a plethora of poor design decisions. Bosses are drawn out battles about memorization more than action, regular enemies are often clumped together beyond reason or placed in areas they’re likely to get cheap shots on you, and a few different instant kills constantly threaten to force some repetition into a game that doesn’t pack in enough of substance to make that repetition worth pushing through.

 

And so, I give Creepy Road for PC…

A BAD rating. While Easy mode can fix some of the balancing issues, especially when it comes to the tedious boss battles, most of what works in Creepy Road is incidental rather than part of the gameplay. The visuals are a good mix of vibrant yet somewhat grotesque, and while it plays almost like a brawler but with guns, the game tries to cram way too many enemies and attacks into one space. Even level shake-ups like a flying segment and a large vertical city you can explore for hidden weapons still contain the issue that there are way too many ways to get damaged and few ways to effectively handle everything thrown at you. The boss battles that do require smart movements rather than lucking out on how enemies chose to behave are learned by dying first and then pushing through the tedium after. There is a good run and gun game hidden beneath layers of bad difficulty balancing and poor enemy placement, and the developers at least seem to know to put ammo and health in the right spots, but even when you’re packing the best weapons, those can’t adequately handle what’s put in front of you because of the disproportionate power of certain enemy attacks.

 

Unfortunately, it seems the difficulty balancing was a deliberate choice in Creepy Road, an attempt to emulate the difficult designs of old run and gun games like Metal Slug and Contra, so while tweaking the enemy positions and removing overpowered enemy attacks could redeem the game, they were likely entirely intentional, and the game suffers for it. Creepy Road’s inspirations both had clear causes for death and threw you right back in after one to help overcome their deliberate difficulty, not to mention enemies who often went down just as fast as you could to mitigate screen crowding. Sadly, Creepy Road only ends up capturing the worse moments of these old classics, an unfortunate case of taking the wrong lessons from well loved titles.