Crate review: Jenga with explosions

I like Jenga. I like explosions. So yes, this game looked like a good idea to me when I found it on Google Play.

Crate is a puzzler by Philippine game development teams Alamat Games. The idea is to explode all regular crates without dropping the nuke crates, which explode on impact with the ground. You have three lives in each level and you lose one life for every nuke crate that explodes. In case you haven’t noticed yet, yes, this game has a lot of explosions in it.

Things don’t always fall the same way

The game is simple enough. All you have to do is recognize the correct pattern, right? Yes, but this doesn’t always guarantee success. This is because the way the crates tilt, fall, and stack on top of one another after each explosion can actually vary. Just like a real stack of crates, these boxes also wobble depending on how stable the rest of the stack is. So it doesn’t matter if you know what the sequence is. If that nuke box wobbles and falls to the ground, it will explode without a care for your “but it worked the first time!” complaint.

I also like how fast you tap affects the in-game physics. For example, if there are two boxes supporting a stack of crates, the idea is to tap on these two boxes consecutively to prevent the stack from falling over. If you do it one at a time, the base is going to be unstable and everything will plummet to its explosive doom. In my experience, the game doesn’t allow tapping two crates at the same time. This might be limited by the device I was playing on, but that would be a cool feature if it was actually inside.

Crate also has three different stages with sixteen levels each. The Techno and Frozen stage are unlockable, but the Nuke Town stage seems to be unavailable at present.

The need for instructions and a reset button

I don’t like games with very lengthy tutorials, but I’m not fond of games that don’t tell me what I’m supposed to be aiming for, either. While Crate had instructions in its Google Play page and is a simple enough game, I still think it needs a short tutorial inside of the app. If I were a person who borrowed someone else’s device, saw this game already installed, and decided to play it, I wouldn’t think of checking the Google Play store to see the instructions.

Crate also doesn’t have a reset or restart button. When I realized I tapped on the wrong box, but still had some lives left, I had to wait for the game over screen to appear just so I could restart the level. I know I made a mistake, now let me restart without having to use up all of my lives or going back to level select to do so!

These two things don’t really affect the gameplay, but it made me like the game a little less.

Because puzzle games should pay attention to audio and visuals