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Crash into Friends Again!



Heroine of the first Crashlands game, Flux Dabes, and her floaty robo buddy Juicebox returns to Woanope for the same cycle of material harvesting and crafting and chatty NPCs, only MOAR!


Gameplay changes from the first game start with the map going from three separate procedurally generated top-down biome maps to one ginormous isometric hand-crafted map, but still with three biome areas.


You could build bases in the first game. In that game, I barely bothered with it aside from some tutorial quest completions. Here, building is essential to completing the game.

Your NPC friends now include "buddies," folks whom you can set up in a room. But they will eventually want Comforts, certain furniture or walls or lighting. Completing their Comforts will unlock further events in the story, as these buddies will also be doing research for you to unlock useful crafting stations and materials and equipment. Each Comfort request that's satisfied will add to their research speed.

In a nice touch, the graphics overhaul includes the addition of roofs. You won't have to add them; they come automatically. When you're in a house, the roof flies off so you can see inside, then falls back in when you're out.

Building is pretty easy, but the stuff to place is only separated into flooring and everything else. So, eventually you'll have a long string of leftover structures to wade through.


Crafting materials come from a variety of sources. Most start from enemy drops and harvested plants, and some rocks. One set of buddy researches include unlocking new drops from everything as well as an increased level of drops.

Mid-game, some items will require components crafted from base mats.

You'll eventually get garden beds for each biome and seeds for all but the most common plants. Each seed will regrow a few times before dying off. You'll also get fertilizer which will supercharge the drops.


Crafting everything requires workstations, of course. And your buddies will be wanting workstations nearby, which you can easily borrow for your own uses.

As in the first game, you can track a single craft item and the game will continually calculate how much you can make from items on hand, so you know when you have enough. I do wish it extended to the base mats for the sub components, or could track the total of multiple crafts.

There's a nice crafting efficiency mechanic. Make enough, and you get a discount on material needed, then a bonus item.


Hundreds of items are available to be crafted. Most recipes are given to you through the game story from your NPC buddies. Other friends will also give you vital item recipes. More recipes, for cosmetic furniture, are scattered about to be found.

At first, the recipes are all lumped together. A few hours in, the crafting system sorts recipes by item type. One-time items like equipment and weapons and workstations are sorted to the top, with a tracked recipe at the very top.

The categories are unlabeled, but it's usually easy to tell what category it is. However, the furniture is all thrown together. This makes it a bit difficult to find some items that you or an NPC buddy wants.

I wish furniture was sorted by either type (table, light, etc) or by style, and had a text name search. And some variants are hidden behind their base type until you highlight the base type and move the R stick.

I also wish requested craft items could be highlighted or sorted up to make it easier to prioritize finding the materials for them.


Armor cannot be swapped out, as it is the main thing that gives you HP. Everything else can be.

You get several different types of weapons, each upgradeeable. No bows or guns, but spears are in the game.

You also get trinkets, which grant you some passive bonus. Then there are tools, such as a pick for rocks and machetes for hacking plants. And you also get gadgets, mostly useful in combat, such as bombs and traps to set.

Many equipped items are part of a set. Each set is devoted to something. There's one for flinging spears and such, as well as ones for poison and fire. Set bonuses come with two and four pieces equipped, and there's plenty of room to mix and match sets.

There's no hunger/thirst mechanic, but there is food, which will either heal you or buff you.


As for the actual exploration and fighting, once again the game uses just about every button on a modern gamepad. One button triggers whatever is highlighted on the hot bar. Most of the other buttons swap to an equipped item. Items in use have a cast speed of various fractions of a second.

You can easily avoid most fights and getting hit simply by keeping moving, making it mostly painless to explore the map. A couple dozen transporters help speed things along, and it's not too far between transporters or to a boss arena.

Fighting is still a lot of hit-dodge, hit-dodge, and waiting for a good time to strike.

One of my favorite items to use was a frying pan, good for stunning and interrupting enemies long enough to get a couple strikes in. The game automatically switched back to my equipped weapon for that.


Or you could let some of the enemies and dangerous plants and such do some of the work. Enemy animals can sometimes get triggered to fight against other enemies not of their kind. Some animals munch on plants and destroy them. Some materials can only be retrieved by exploiting certain interactions.


I forget how the last game handled death. Here, when you die, you lose half your crafting materials but maybe not unequipped healing items. The rest is stored in a fun decoy. The decoy's shape and the music accompanying it make it easy to find again. It is also helpfully marked on your map.

You'll need a second or two to retrieve your stuff when you find this decoy. This becomes an annoyance when you die in certain areas.

Death at the hands of bosses, however, just send you back to your respawn point with everything, and you have to redo the fight and all dialogue until you win.


Three difficulty modes are in the game. Adventure is basically Normal. Chill is Easy mode. Challenge is the Hard one.

You can freely change difficulty in the game. This affects at least your HP.

I went with the default, Adventure, for most of the game, switching down to Chill for a middle boss that was healing too fast, then switched back.


Fertilizer and buffing food is made in part with fished items. This is done with two very easy minigames, one for algae and small fish, the other for larger fishies. You'll also get some bait to improve the haul of fish with each cast.


Pets return to the game. You find eggs for enemy animals and hatch them and raise them, and they will fight for you.

I forget if I did much with the pets in the first game, but here, I found their attacks, which can be on command with a cooldown, to be very, very useful with strong monsters and especially the bosses.

For a couple of the bosses, I ended up just continually moving and dodging attacks, whose area of impact was telegraphed a few seconds ahead, and commanding my pet to attack when the boss was stationary.

Too bad the early game pets cannot level up with you. I'm sure making the various pet attacks available in the endgame would add to the gameplay combos.


This was a fun game, and a good franchise is building. Lots and lots of humor to be had in the dialogue.

But also a warm beating heart beneath the fun. The storyline is a celebration of community and friendship. Each of your NPC buddies has an emotional arc to complete.