Basement Crawl

We don’t think that any developer intentionally sets out to make a bad product, but Bloober Team’s dark Bomberman-inspired arena battler Basement Crawl launched in the worst state imaginable. We didn’t actually get around to reviewing the game, simply because we couldn't get it to work at first. However, while we’re informed that it's now somewhat playable, those few that did manage to test it out hammered it – landing it an abysmal 27 score average on Metacritic.

Still, while we accept that not every game is great, we do appreciate it when a developer admits as much. As such, it’s nice to hear that the Polish organisation is working on rebuilding the above title from scratch – and aiming to release the update for free to those who’ve already spent money on it. “I should start this off by apologising to those of you who bought [the game], and have been waiting for us to fix it,” Marc Colhoun told GameSpot. “The game was a mess for both you and us.”

He continued: “Usually, what you will see at this point is a lot of marketing talk, and maybe a patch. Rather than accepting defeat on this and issuing a patch that kinda fixes this or kinda improves that, we have decided to just come out and explain to you where we are right now and what we plan to do. We have been rebuilding the game, completely from scratch, and on a new engine.” Colhoun added that it’s up to the company to rectify the mistakes that it has made.

“We don’t want to come out and say that this [new version] is going to be 10/10 Game of the Year, but just a way for us to regain the trust of gamers,” he explained. “We also really don’t want anyone to think that this is some kind of quick money grab. So, we will be giving this game for free to people who bought the original game. This is our priority, to ensure that we give you what you expected from us.”

In order to ensure that it gets things right at its second attempt, the studio’s eager to collaborate with as many players of the original version as possible. “This deals with the technical issues that we ran into, but a few of you spoke about how there needs to be a tutorial, artificial intelligence, more game types, and so on,” Colhoun said. “We have added all of these things into the game and more. We aren’t talking about it too much simply because we are in no position to be making promises to people.”

There’s no date attached to the new version, but it will be issued as a post-release patch for the existing build in the future. Alas, while we do admire the developer’s honesty here, we think that the manner in which it rushed the release out – presumably to take advantage of the hungry early adopter crowd – was the biggest mistake that it made. Hopefully it’s learned its lesson, and will take its time with future titles. It certainly seems sincere in the above quotes.

[source gamespot.com]