It’s been a while since I tested my arm strength and stamina… no, not in the way you’re thinking. I’m talking about playing clicker games! Tap Titans was the last one I played and boy did I suffer for it. After a few hundred level, my arms would ache and I’d have to take a week off from playing… Crab War takes a familiar genre and beautifies it (but still results in aching arms)! Read more in our Crab War review.

Platform Used For Crab War Review: iPad 2
Developer: Appxplore
Genre: RPG, Clicker
Recommended If You Liked: Tap Titans, Tap Tycoon
Rating:
Price: Free with in app purchases

Enter our Crab War Promotional Code Giveaway to get your hands on some free premium currency!

The Long Version

You’ve just gotta love Appxplore. First I played their deviously difficult Alien Hive, and now they’re back at it again with Crab War!

Crab War is what’s known as a clicker game. The concept of clicker games is to click, or tap the screen of your device as much as you can to achieve your goal. In fantasy style clicker games, you need to wreak havoc on monsters and other such enemies. Other clicker games like Tap Tycoon have you earning money with every tap so you can build your fortune.

All clicker games follow a certain formula. Crab War follows the same route by giving you a main source of dealing damage by tapping. In this case you are given crabs (I honestly couldn’t find a better way to word that sentence) that attack the enemy every time you tap the screen. To start with, you have access to just a handful of different crabs to level up with gold earned from enemy kills, but as you progress, you can unlock more. Each crab can be evolved to gain better stats like a higher crit rate, extra speed etc.

What sets Crab War apart from other clicker games is that you can choose which path you’d like to take your crabs down. Each crab has access to an evolution tree that lets you choose which type of evolution they undergo. I.e. Your crab could either gain higher crit rate and crit damage, or it could gain extra damage against bosses and extra speed. But once you’ve chosen which evolution path to take, you can’t de-evolve them, so choose wisely.

Queens can also be unlocked which increase your overall damage per second (DPS). The queens attack automatically and keep working on the enemies even after you’ve put the game down. When a Queen reaches a certain level it gains access to extra perks. It seems the perks provide an upgrade to DPS, but I’m not entirely sure because there isn’t a way to check.

Next come abilities. Abilities act as powerups that give you an advantage in battle. Once activated, the ability will be on a cool-down and can’t activate again until the cool-down finishes. Abilities can be levelled up once your main Crab level gets to a certain point. I.e. At level one-hundred, you gain access to the ability Colossal Crab. This sends a giant crab at the enemy dealing massive damage. Handy against bosses that otherwise prevent you from progressing further.

The Enemies

You and your team of crabs are up against giant reptiles that have invaded the crabs’ home. These evil monstrosities come in all shapes, sizes and colours. They’re very interesting to look at, and the bosses are even cooler!

Enemies will stick around until they’re defeated but won’t fight back. The only time you’ll be in danger is when you face a boss. Boss monsters will fling their tongue out, slurping up any crabs or queens that get in the way. This ultimately reduces your DPS for a short period of time which can often mean the difference between progressing and failing miserably.

To make things harder, boss fights are timed. If you don’t manage to defeat the boss before the time bar beneath it’s health bar depletes, you’ll have to start again.

If you struggle, farm gold by defeating as many regular enemies as you can. Once you really start to struggle, it’s time to Ecdysis! We’ll explain more about that further down.

Extra Help

Similar to Tap Titans, every now and then you’ll get lucky and have a butterfly flutter it’s way around the screen. If you manage to tap it, you’ll be presented with either a temporary ability or free currency. Usually the free currency bonuses will require you to watch a video in exchange.

However, playing on an iPad 2 which is probably the earliest iDevice that can run Crab War comfortably, watching videos can often result in crashes. So I tend not to go for the butterfly bonuses that require me to watch an advert.

Another hinderance that gets quite annoying is the static adverts randomly popping up during play; more often than not when you stop tapping or open up the menu. The ads appear right in the middle of the fray, so if you’re not paying attention, you’ll be dragged to the App Store. And when you’re playing on an older device like the iPad 2, it takes a few minutes to be able to close the App Store and get back to playing.

Continue reading on the next page…

[schema type=”review” url=”https://geo.itunes.apple.com/au/app/crab-war/id1024875461?mt=8&at=11l32yZ” name=”Download Crab War” description=”Crab War is what’s known as a clicker game. The concept of clicker games is to click, or tap the screen of your device as much as you can to achieve your goal. In fantasy style clicker games, you need to wreak havoc on monsters and other such enemies. Other clicker games like Tap Tycoon have you earning money with every tap so you can build your fortune.” rev_name=”Crab War Review” rev_body=”Be warned, Crab War is incredibly addictive and once you start tapping, you mightn’t be able to stop! Take regular breaks and keep your arms and wrists limber by making sure you stretch between sessions. Trust me… it’s not nice having sore wrist muscles for days!” author=”GameReviews AU” pubdate=”2016-03-24″ user_review=”4″ min_review=”1″ max_review=”5″ ]