Everything is Crab Review: A Roguelite that Grabs You, But Not Without Cracks

Roguelitegames are pretty popular lately, and Everything is Crab is no exception. This kooky evolution-themed game offers a lot of interesting mechanics to explore and has a remarkably cute art style.

I played the game for around 10 hours and got to really dive into the evolutions provided, along with all the challenge modes involved in the game. There's a whole lot here, but that doesn't make it all entirely great.

I enjoyed my time with Everything is Crab, but some things need to change if the game wants to have the staying power of its predecessors, like Vampire Survivors. Luckily, it seems the devs have a plan to add content for free in the future.

What is Everything is Crab?

Underneath the cute art style, this game is strictly a Roguelite where you'll play through rounds that last about 20 minutes each as you attempt to survive and evolve by eating various kinds of food. You'll choose evolutions as you gobble up whatever you can find and fight off different kinds of enemies to survive until one of the bosses spawns.

There is a form of meta-progression as you play through various difficulty levels in the main game mode. These do pretty much exactly what you think, in that they make enemies hit harder, have more health, and give diminishing returns to things. As you complete these Pressure levels and complete milestones, you'll unlock Genetics, which can boost your game in various ways.

Some Genetics are pretty straightforward buffs, like giving you bonus health, while others are a little more complex, like giving you bonus rarity to evolutions the greater your current size. These provide players a way to sort of adjust their playstyle from run to run in order to keep things more interesting. At the beginning of each run following Pressure 1, you'll be able to mix two genetics together to have a more unique starting spot.

Beyond that, the game offers challenge rounds, which give you certain stipulations that limit your abilities while you make your run. They last the same amount of time and have you face off against the same kinds of enemies as the regular mode. You'll still need to complete certain levels of Pressure before you can unlock ones higher up the ladder.

An Adorable Art Style

There's no denying that one of the major things going for this game is that Darwin, your player character, is adorable, and even as he evolves into whatever monstrosity you'd like, he'll always be entertaining to look at. Whether he's got three eyes and tentacles, or wings and six legs, Darwin always seems to move and look good.

I really enjoyed the visuals from enemy designs to the world designs, and a lot of the time, those designs are used for laughs. There are fish people with big heads of fish and skinny legs, and some small animals that stretch their mouths wide when attacking, making it very comedic right from the jump.

The environments don't look half bad either, but really, they aren't as visually interesting as the characters in the game. As the time in a round goes on, the surrounding creatures also change and evolve. That was a really nice touch that added a layer of difficulty without seeming to be too out of place.

Visually, the game feels very simple, but not in a bad way. It makes it easy to understand and digest, which I thought was a brilliant way to focus on the changes that occur as you level up evolutions and turn into a strange amalgamation of parts.

A Mile Wide, But an Inch Deep

This is always hard to run into, especially in Roguelike games, because it really limits the amount of enjoyment you can get out of a game. Everything is Crab has a major problem, and it's that the game basically boils down to a small number of builds with virtually no variety in those options.

Some of this is due to the fact that the game doesn't offer enough evolutions that feel impactful, but really, what it boils down to is that only a handful of the evolutions have a specialization. These unlock as you level up an evolution and give you one of two pathways to go with it. It's a neat way to add some variety to evolutions and have them slot into alternate builds.

The only problem is that it's basically nonexistent for almost every evolution in the game. There needs to be significantly more of these so that the less powerful or interesting evolutions won't just be ignored in favor of something that's objectively stronger in the short term. But that isn't just where the problem ends.

After about ten runs of this game, you've basically seen everything there is to see. That's not too bad in some cases, but here it really struggles, because you can clearly see how some builds are just significantly more powerful than others by an extreme margin. I ended up basically always building into size and health because those were the stats that seemed to appear on most of the evolutions.

When I didn't get those evolutions, things typically became more difficult for me in the long run. There's definitely some balancing that needs to happen, but that can also come in the form of specializations and more evolutions. That would help significantly, but it won't stop one of the bigger problems the game has as a whole: RNG.

A Little Too Random

Yes, I know this sounds a little ridiculous given the type of game this is, but one of the major appeals of Roguelite games is that they give you a way to combat a bit of the randomness and let you build out from there. RNG is important and plays a pivotal role, but at the end of the day, being able to mitigate that randomness is just as important, and here, there's almost no way to do that.

There is a way to sort of adjust this during a run, as every time you pick an evolution, it'll level up one of the Affinities. This gives you a higher chance of getting evolutions that share that Affinity. That's fine, but realistically, it isn't the issue that comes up with RNG while you play the game.

Two things will affect your run far more than anything else: Alphas and POIs. Alphas are stronger versions of the same mobs you fight all over the map, except they drop Mutagen, which you need to increase the rarity of evolutions or reroll those evolutions, while POIs are small things that appear randomly around the map and give you a choice between two kinds of upgrades, such as healing X amount of health or increasing your Regeneration stat.

These don't sound all that important, but when you spawn into a run that has more of these close by, it's way more likely that run will work out in your favor. When they aren't nearby, or you hardly run into any of them, you can get stuck into a build that isn't optimal, with no way to increase your stats beyond evolving more.

It sounds like a silly thing to land on, but it's compounded by the fact that you don't get to choose your Genetics in each run. Instead, you'll choose one from a random array of three twice, which effectively determines what kind of build you're going for. Some of the Genetics are just straight up useless because they don't offer a significant contribution, while others feel like a must-pick if you manage to get them.

For instance, one of these, Patient, allows you to skip evolution upgrades for the chance at a higher rarity upgrade the next go round. That's worthless strictly because it is a random chance. It does stack, which is nice, but having to wait three or four levels to get something of a higher rarity just defeats the purpose of the game.

A World of Evolution Locked Away

The RNG issues aside, I just don't think there's really enough here. That sounds a little cruel, but there just aren't that many combinations to make things worthwhile, and a majority of the upgrades you can get are locked behind specific Branching evolutions, which you get from defeating bosses, so you'll only get three or four in a run.

Want crab claws? You'll need to get the Branching evolution for arms. Want to be able to spit? You'll need to grab the Beak attack first. It makes sense when you think about it, but part of the fun of these kinds of games is making insane combinations. In Everything is Crab, you can't combine things in any meaningful way.

To me, that was one thing that simply struck me as odd. Why not let players have all kinds of crazy things? Let them have a beak with a trunk or something equally ridiculous. It's probably to prevent the overlapping of abilities and visuals, which makes sense, but still really gets in the way of enjoyment.

It does add a layer of choice into the game that isn't too big of an issue, but with the way the rest of the game works, you can get locked into a build pretty quickly, and it may not be something that fits well with the Genetics you're running. This might become a much smaller issue when the other issues get fixed later down the line.

A Limited Evolutionary Path

Branching evolutions are super cool, but there are so few of them, and they're so wildly unbalanced. Overall, I think there needs to be more evolutions in general, but there absolutely needs to be a massive increase in the number of Branching evolutions specifically the game puts forth. In total, there are eight Branching evolutions.

Most of them don't even unlock any kind of other evolutions, which makes them less appealing to take over other evolutions that provide better bonuses. Some of them, like Alpha and Tentacles, just provide bonuses that are too good to pass up over something like Wings, which just makes you faster and less slow in various environments.

It really limits what you can pick, because these upgrades are rare enough that one poor choice can really hammer your run straight into the ground. I'd like to see these be a bit more impactful on the whole; for instance, Wings could unlock some kind of blowback attack that does light damage, but creates good space.

It just feels like so many things are still missing from the game. That being said, what's there is actually amazing and really enjoyable. It can provide a lot of hours of fun, but it'll get fairly repetitive fairly quickly. The devs do have some changes coming, and some additions slotted for the next big update, which is very promising for this interesting Roguelite.

Everything is Crab combines Roguelike gameplay with Spore-like evolutions to create something that feels wholly unique. That doesn't stop the game from falling into the trap of having a bit too much RNG. It's visually interesting with a fun art style that showcases those evolutions well, but gets weighed down by some of the more pressing issues. All in all, Everything is Crab is a good game that is hopefully well on the way to becoming a great game.