Appearing at PAX West with a demo, Super Crush K.O. is proving itself to be the home run for the Canadian developer - Vertex Pop. It's a combo-heavy game about the super girl-crush punching and shooting her way to save her cat from the alien.
Here's the trailer of the game back at E3 2019. You can see it below to get some looks of what's special about this game before reading our overview from the PAX's demo.
Don't even think about capturing my cat!
Super Crush K.O. takes the settings of a fictional pastel world, which has been invaded by a bunch of AI. That might be a serious threat for humankind, but's not a deal for the teenage girl - Karen. She is still doing her normal daily things: lying on the bed with her phone, chatting and listening to music.
However, those AI might have made their biggest mistake ever: kidnapping Karen's cat - Chubb. Now, the super crush no longer tolerates anymore, as she'll user her superpower as well as her martial art maneuver to punch, kick and shoot her way to save the cat. Maybe she will also save humankind from this danger as well, but who cares!
Satisfying melee combats
From the developer, Super Crush K.O. is a "fast-paced brawler", but I think the game has many more fascinating things in it than just that short description. To be more specific, after trying the demo at PAX, I might want to call this game as a vibrant side-scrolling with extremely satisfying combats.
In Super Crush K.O., Karen will suit her favorite neon jacket up and combo through the hordes of AI machines. The gameplay is quite straightforward, as Karen doesn't have many approaches to defeat her enemies. She can only choose from melee fights, which she'll beat-em-up with her punching and kicking moves, or shooting-em-up using her gun.
Let's speak about the melee combat first. She can perform totally five moves, including her "Ultimate". The first one is the Twister Drill, as Karen will dash through lines of machines, blowing up to the sky while dealing damage. After that, she can follow up with an Uppercut Slice, as she vertically punches them to the air with her.
Using her leg, she can Air Pop her enemies down, kicking her foes down to the ground. The fourth ability is Ground Shake, in which she will knock her enemies to the sky (again) by fisting really hard on the ground to release a shockwave. Lastly - her ultimate - Karen might have stolen the Kamehameha move from Dragon Ball series and made it pink to eliminate her enemies. However, to perform this skill, you need your blue bar on the upper left corner of the screen fully filled.
You can see most of those maneuvers in the trailer above, but it's only the slight introduction. In fact, you can combine those abilities at any order you want, with slight (or no) animation transition at all. Nevertheless, they're not free to use since you'll have to use some parts from her "ability bar" to perform them. That bar is separated into 4 parts, accordant to each ability, and you can only use them once a segment is full. This bar will be gradually rising every time you punch or kick your enemies.
That's why at first, I found the combats are quite easy, but I keep dying later on being mindless about those minor things. Well, I can't say it's minor anymore, as it brings a whole new level of strategy to the game.
Karen can shoot-em-up too in Super Crush K.O.
At those times where you don't have enough "blue" to spend on melee abilities, you'll have to rely on your gun. You can shoot your enemies from afar to slay them down, get some recharge on your ability bar and keep going on. The more interesting thing about the gun is that its actually allows you to float when you're shooting!
To be more specific, you can punch your enemies to the sky, jump up and switch to your gun immediately, and shoot them while staying completely suspended in the sky. As long as you're spraying, you'll stay on the air forever. That sounds very unbalanced, but in fact, that's basically impossible, as you have an ammo meter as well.
However, this bar works differently from the ability bar. With the "blue bar", you'll need to constantly punch your enemies or find recharges from the dead machines to get it filled. However, with the ammo pin, it will gradually recharge if you put your gun away. Hence, mixing between melee abilities and shooting smoothly will be the key to lead you to success.
To remind you, like the Devil May Cry series, this game also ranks your performance on the letter-based grade, so you might want to be as stylish as possible.
Main defensive technique against pastel machines
I don't know what to describe the AI machines in this game. Its visuals are quite terrifying, but the pastel colors make them stupidly cute. However, as people said, don't judge the book by its cover, those monster are very deadly, and they're even tankier at later stages. Fortunately, the attacks and obstacles that they release will be marked with a bright red color, which you might want to find carefully in this vibrant world.
Karen might be very brave and powerful, but she's not stupid to head onto the enemies fire. Instead, she can choose to avoid them by dodging or dashing. Your dodge is as powerful as the Royal Guard of Dante, as you will totally negate all of your enemies explosives. The dash is quite small but reasonable, in which you can make use while platforming as well.
Super Crush K.O is still under development, and there is no official release date of the game yet. The developer has promised that they'll deliver the game on early 2020 for Switch and PC on Steam.