Fight Crab is weird. Everything about this game is weird. How can a game featuring a king crab holding a knife in one claw, a katana in the other, as he fights other crustaceans in the Sahara desert or on the moon not be. It’s like the fever dream of a SyFy original movie writer come to life in video game form. Fight Crab is weird. I love Fight Crab.

Look, I’m a sucker for weird games, especially the older I get. The doldrum of committee created games coming out that are barely enhanced versions of what came before has become almost laughable. It’s probably why I cover so many indie games here as the AAA video game industry has seemed to have lose its creativity, something that seems even more pronounced with the new generation of consoles hitting the markets without a single original game to their names.

Fight Crab isn’t the sort of game you’ll spend hours in mastering its fighting techniques, you won’t be getting a huge expansive open-world, and you won’t get lost in some deep narrative. What you will be doing is flailing your claws around like a madman while holding dangerous weapons on your quest to kill your crabby friends. It’s the sort of game that gets announced on April Fools Day by some major studio as a joke before they get back to pumping out the next incremental update to a long past its prime series.

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Fight Crab is all about crabby combat. Think of it along the lines of one of those “weird” physics games like QWOP or Surgeon Simulator. In the game you fight with hideous hard-shelled ocean combatants and it’s your job to beat up the opponent and flip them on their back, hoping that they can not right themselves before the death timer runs out. This becomes easier the more damage you deal out via the Smash Bros-like damage counter. The kicker is that you are in full control of your claws using each of the joysticks with buttons for attacks. Your huge claws are then used as both offensive and defensive tools during combat. You can block attacks, you can strike, you can pinch to controls enemy limbs, and you can scuttling around, dragging your big meaty claws with you.

The fun comes in positioning yourself in each fight. You can flail your arms around and have a blast as a silly party game, or you can learn the physics and become the king crab of kicking ass. It’s an incredibly simple game to understand right off the bat but it does give you the impression that there is some depth to it’s fighting mechanics unlike so many of its contemporaries. And while the combat is simple and fun, Fight Crab gets its claws into you thanks to the amount of weapons and items at your disposal. It’s like that famous viral video of the crab scuttling by holding a kitchen knife in his meaty claw on steroids.

When swords and similar weapons are in play it controls like some game in VR. I’ve never played The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword but many people that played Fight Crab with me noted that the control with weapons feels pretty similar only lacking the motion control. What I do know is that Skyward Sword features some wonky-ass combat and that I can totally see in Fight Crab. It’s like flopping about a wet handful of spaghetti. Yes, this game is a joke that the developers lost control of in the most beautiful of way, but that’s why people dig it. This is all about getting a couple of friends over and getting lost in the chaos of it all. Fight Crab begs to be played at a party over a few drinks.

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And while there is some depth to it all, after a couple of rounds of Fight Crab it always ends up going the same way, especially with new players. You jump into the tutorial to understand the combat and movement control before heading into a fight that you focus much too hard on trying to win. By around the third match you realize this isn’t Tekken 7 and just throw caution and technique to the wind to simply mash buttons and wave your pincers around like you’re reenacting the party crab viral video. All your best laid plans will almost always go FUBAR and you’ll just have a laughing/screaming fit with friends as you try to slam Thor’s hammer on your coconut crab friend who is trying to gut you with his bastard sword.

Fight Crab is straight up weird and the perfect sort of game for short bursts of play. It’s the kind of game that I all boot up when I don’t know what to play or when I have a few minutes of free time during the day and need a shot of serotonin. It’s always good for a laugh thanks to the absurdity of the whole affair and that would have been fine. I would be happy as most of these sorts of games end there or with some couch co-op. Thankfully, Fight Crab offers up more thanks to the online multiplayer. I tend to stay away from online play, especially with fighting games, but Fight Crab really benefits from online competitive play.

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I was lucky enough to snag a pair of codes and had a blast playing matches against my partner quarantined over 2,000 miles away. And while connecting to a match felt like a complicated technical exam (it was confusing on both ends) once you get into a match things run smoothly. Fight Crab is a much better game when you have someone else to play with or against. This is great as while the game does feature some depth and strategy, more often than not you won’t use any sort of technique and simply lose yourself in the madness of it all. Look, this isn’t a title heading onto the EVO main stage, although I do appreciate how serious the developers took the project.

Fight Crab is silly fun that is easy to recommended, especially on the Nintendo Switch. It isn’t revolutionary or does anything to push the genre forward but it is the perfect palate cleanser type of game and it’s unique enough to stand on its gimmick alone.

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Final Score.

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*Review key(s) provided by publisher*

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