The world has been undeniably chaotic for a while now. Personally, it’s been tough to try to get into deep, complex games. Lighter games have been a godsend. Fight Crab falls into this category and while it was initially far too difficult, recent updates have made the game much easier, and as a result, much more fun.

Fight Crab has no pretensions about itself. It is a series of interlinked fights with crabs wielding crowbars, cars, trees, and ancient cursed swords. Its not going for a deep, involved story, and its likely all the better for it. It’s free to just be itself.

The campaign levels play out in a pretty similar way. Each level has a theme, such as a city or an ancient hall. You are thrown into a fight with either one or two crabs. In the environment there will be various weapons throughout that you can pick up to deal additional damage beyond what your claws can do. As you damage opponents, they will be easier to flip onto their back. Once a character is on their back for three seconds, the round is over.

The controls take some serious getting used to, however. The analog sticks rotate your crabs claws, and can consequently control rotation. You use the d-pad to move in the four cardinal directions. Wrapping your head around this is tricky and its made even more so when you have to get your crab off of their back.

If you are on your back, you have to rotate your claws to propel yourself forward. Sometimes, this won’t work properly and it can be confusing. On the other hand, if you are trying to flip your opponent, they can get up easily. You end up throwing yourself on their body to pin them to the ground. Later levels, you can throw enemies off the sides of levels for an easy kill. As you take damage, you will fill up a hyper move meter. You deal more damage and at the end of activation, you activate an area of effect burst that knocks enemies back.

Environments can be as big of an enemy as opponents. As you deal more damage, the environment begins to break. This can block your view, making fights much more difficult.

As you get through more and more levels, you can purchase upgrades to your crabs, along with other weapons and equipment. You can also purchase other crabs, who each have their own unique stats you can level up.

Prior to a set of recent updates, the game was surprisingly difficult. It was extremely easy to be flipped and flipping opponents could take an extreme amount of damage. However, thanks to recent updates, fights are much easier. Also, if you fail a fight, you can get help from an AI partner. The experience is significantly easier and thankfully, much less frustrating.

Fight Crab feels like it could be at its best during co-op play. While the Steam version includes remote local play, during my time with it, I was unable to get it working properly. I also was not able to get into a game of online versus play.

Even with those variety, Fight Crab is still decently fun. The core conceit is funny and surprisingly deep for what it is. Had the difficulty not been rebalanced, it likely would be too frustrating to recommend. However, if you are looking for a light, fun experience, Fight Crab is a pretty easy recommendation.

SCORE: 7.0 out of 10

A code for Fight Crab was provide to Pixel Related for review.