The Croods - The full Android app review

The Croods Game Play

If you’ve played a Facebook flash game in your lifetime, then you can probably play The Croods without a problem. Like Facebook flash games, you are set on a big screen where you can perform a myriad of tasks. In terms of premise, you’ll be capturing wild animals, taming them, raising them, and feeding them. Feeding them will earn you items that you can use to progress through the game and you can also use them to feed other animals.

In addition to that, you will be completing chores assigned to you by Gran, the local old person. These tasks don’t include anything difficult. You’ll be adding or removing scenery like trees, capturing animals, collecting items, and performing other menial tasks. In exchange you’ll get gold coins and experience. If you’re bogged down on items, you can hand them off to Ugga. Ugga will make you soup that you can use to upgrade your animals. It’s also a good way to grind for gold coins.

It doesn’t take nearly as long to explain as it takes to perform. All these things will keep gamers very busy as things tend to move pretty quickly. At least during the beginning of the game. However, if you look closely, there is a pattern to the game. It’s capturing and feeding animals and completing tasks assigned by Gran.

One thing we didn’t like about The Croods is that it’s a freemium game. So there are in app purchases where you can buy more crystal and gold coins. This is fine if you don’t mind spending a few extra bucks. For more serious gamers, this will be irritating as the game intentionally bottlenecks these resources to motivate people to buy them. You can play the game without spending any real money, but after a point there will be copious amounts of grinding for coins and crystals. This is an aspect we were very disappointed in.

The Croods Graphics and Sound

If you were hoping The Croods would impress you in these areas, you can forget it. The soundtrack is uninspired but it does what it’s supposed to, which is fill the silence space in the background. There are sound clips for various tasks and the characters will interact with one another occasionally.

The graphics in The Croods is about on par with most Facebook flash games. This is both good and bad. It’s good because those games are typically played on computers and this is an Android game. It’s bad because those graphics aren’t overly impressive. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good, but they just don’t impress. You will not have any problems identifying characters and associating them with their characters in the movie.

The Croods Overall

The game play for The Croods has a lot of potential to be extremely addictive. While no one likes the tedious grind of collecting items and leveling up, The Croods tries to push the pace on this so there is always something to do. In most cases, they succeed but there are still some tasks that take awhile. A plus to this, though, is that you will receive notifications for the game outside of the game. So when something is done building your animals need fed, you can receive notifications for it. So you don’t actually have to play in the game to still be playing.

At the end of the day, though, it depends on what kind of gamer you are. More serious gamers are not fans of the freemium premise and they won’t appreciate having gold and crystals (the main resources used for building things) bottlenecked to such a degree that they have to grind just to have enough. On the other hand, fans of games like Farmville 2 or Cafe World will feel right at home with The Croods as it features many similar mechanics to those games. By the time we were doing reviewing, we couldn’t really tell if we were playing a Rovio game or a Zynga game.

Wrap Up

If this looks like something you’re interested in, you can click the source link below to download it from the Google Play Store. It’s free to play, even if many of the elements in-game can be bought. We were able to see the charm in the game, especially if you’re excited about seeing the movie. However, we couldn’t get passed the fact that it looks and plays like a Zynga game on Facebook. So, once again, if you’re into that kind of stuff, then The Croods is right up your alley. If you don’t like those kinds of games, you could do your blood pressure a favor and steer clear.