A fun little bite-sized roguelite from the early years. It's a fun romp with zany explosions and a surprisingly bumpin soundtrack as well. I kind of wish there was more lore and that the end game was a little more fleshed out, but for a fun couple hours of gameplay it's a definite recommend.

Quite repetitive. I couldn't get invested in it like I did with Cannon Fodder (The 90's DOS game that it was inspired by).

Great game and one of the best soundtracks I've enjoyed in my life. Cheers Syphus!

I love Pineapple Crew, I couldn't stop playing it back when it came out

Good concept, seems like it would be fun; but you experience the whole game within an hour.

Has potential but not enough content to keep it going.

- It is procedural generated but it never gave any reason to ever explore the levels. The best bet is to beeline to the objectives and ignore everything else.
- The crew mechanic is interesting, but all you can do is give them hats. Would be nice to outfit them with different weapons or something.
- You can collect experience but no idea what it does other than make your outfit a different color.
- The crew mechanic is also a pain, if you loose anybody good luck finishing the level on normal+. The final boss is always the same and is a huge bullet sponge. The cool down on the guns means the boss fight becomes spinning around the boss until either your timer runs out and you die, or you kill him. Not very thrilling.

Got it from a bundle so it was fun and enjoyed most of the time, but $10 is high for the available content.

So Pineapple Smash Crew,

Believe it or not this is actually one of the first games i picked up on this platform, it just happened to pass by one day and after seeing the neo-retro artstyle my compulsive little gamer brain had decided to buy it before my parents' bank account could ever object.

But enough personal exposition. What's the game like i hear you ask.
Well in terms of gameplay it stays true to that retro feel i mentioned earlier. Though i don't see that as a bad thing (and i'm never wrong), the mechanics that are here feel more polished because of it. The roguelike crew-management mechanics are a nice touch too and incentivise you to actually think and strategize rather than going in guns a blazing, though there is still more than enough opportunity for that don't worry.

Closely tied to this aforementioned strategising is the grenade mechanic. In the game each of your soldiers can carry a grenade, these 'nades come in many different types with each having their own unique behaviour. This is in my humble gamer opinion one of the most important mechanics in the game, as it not only directly affects the way you play this game but also allows you to quickly switch up your style of gameplay if things aren't really working out. Wanna take things more slow? Take the shield and heal grenade. Need some more firepower? Use the laser and missile grenades. You get the point.

Is all of this worth 10 bucks though? If you'd ask me i'd probably say why not? I don't mind supporting indie developers and to me that more than makes up for the extra costs. But if you're short on money i'd suggest you put this on your wishlist and wait for the next steam sale. Because if you like top-down retro shooters, i think this should be right up your alley.

Oh and P.S: Game's got a dope soundtrack

I have thought about this game a lot since 2012. Sure it isn't that great as a complete package, but there is something really special about it. Maybe if Rich had more time to add content or some help, this game would have really been something extraordinary. What we got is great but flawed nonetheless. I hold this title dear to my heart for inspiring me to enter the industry, and for being a labor of love that never quite reached the heights it could have.

To me, PSC is very bittersweet. I don't know how Rich is doing. I wish him the best. But this game gained little traction. I can't imagine it could sustain a career for long. Everything about the game oozes with a love for gaming. The controls are crisp and the main loop of clearing out ships on pro-merc is a blazing fast expedition of twitchy reflexes and planning. But that is all there is. Every level feels the same, which is a massive shame. A game like this could have really left a mark on the indie scene, but it just couldn't dress its beautiful bones in enough meat. This is likely the result of the project being a solo endeavor. Making a game is REALLY hard, especially when you are alone. Props to Rich, but I wish there was more. 9 years later and I still wish for a sequel to go deeper.

I recommend PSC to anyone who thinks it looks cool and isn't expecting something too deep. If you are looking for especially deep gameplay, well designed levels, or a wealth of content, then you may want to pass.

Shooting has become one of the primary ways we interact with game worlds. If you don’t believe me, check the front page of Steam and count how many images have guns in them. Horrifying implications aside, shooting can be a cathartic, light-hearted experience depending on what and how you’re shooting. Pineapple Smash Crew falls into this category, I think, despite its roguelike airs and hordes of monsters. That’s because all the gunning you do in this one is simple, gratifying, and accompanied by all kinds of clever explosions. There’s not much to it besides that, but with this style of shooting, that’s pretty much all you need.

I’m a little fuzzy on the plot details of this one, but you’re running some kind of salvage crew that goes out to derelict spacecraft to loot them of credits and take out specific targets. Your ultimate goal is a hidden mothership, whose coordinates you can only piece together with data from dozens of drifting hulks in the void. Fortunately your crew of four is a hardy bunch, able to take punishment from aliens and robots squatting on the ships and dish it out far better. Even the security drones that serve as the bosses of these wrecks can’t hold a candle to your crew, especially after you start leveling them up and get them some shiny new hats.

That’s pretty much the whole game right there, not just the plot. Pineapple Smash Crew is a top-down shooter where four shooty-types follow your orders around as a cluster and blast away at whatever you click on. The team shares an ammo bar that depletes rapidly when they fire, but regenerates just as fast when not. Their health is separate, though, and you’ll need to keep track of that to position your more injured troops conservatively. Each member can also hold a grenade, and there’s over a dozen flavors of these in the game. We’re talking conventional explosives, EMPs, unfolding turrets, gravity wells, and even healing. And yes, your crew levels up as you complete missions which gets them slightly better stats.

The ships you plunder are randomly-generated grids of rooms, which themselves may also be randomly-generated. Depending on your goal, you may have to collect three doodads, blast away some toxic barrels, kill all the monsters, or other sundry tasks to succeed. Enemies tend to be creepy-crawlies or robots, most of which will want to melee you but a few shoot at you themselves or just explode. The real killer here is carelessness, as an exploding foe or exploding barrel can take big chunks out of your life bars that most enemies won’t. The movement is brisk and the shooting is a delightful little cacophony, but there’s not a terrible lot of variety to it. Monsters and rooms are never going to reach any kind of impressive setpiece scope, so you’ll have to content yourself with blazing away with your guns and chucking grenades forever.

Pineapple Smash Crew is definitely entertaining, but it’s a toss-up as to how long it can hold your attention. The quest for the mothership is a long one, taking probably 3 to 4 hours to hoover up all the data needed. You earn credits during missions but they’re mainly for buying silly, useless hats for your team. Terminals on some missions describe the deep lore behind the game, but that’s not the most compelling reason to stick with a game. What can stick you here is the chaos and fun of running your dudes around and blowing up everything with creative grenades. That seems like something everyone can enjoy, if only for an hour or two.



Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them at https://goldplatedgames.com/ or on my curation page!

Sad to see they didn’t continue to develop this. It is a fun game. Co-op would be a lot of fun. Especially on the cough with friends.

You might get an hour or 2 of fun out of this but once you have finished your first ship you have seen pretty much everything the game has to offer. You just repeat the process over and over again.

Tags: Topdown - Isaaclike
Additional Tags: Delete Local Content & Remove from Library

TLDR: Twinstick dungeoncrawl without Xbox360pad support. Simplistic mechanics. Limited assets. Unsatisfying gunplay. Repetitive.

This is basically a pure twinstick shooter. The dungeon aspect is just an excuse to recycle the same assets a lot and procedurally generate a bunch of small rooms connected with corridors and doors.

So the idea is to pick one of the levels, that has a name and difficulty. The seed gets generated. You look at your crude minimap and determine where to go. You navigate to that screen while minimizing encounters then clear whatever is hostile on that screen, clear crates, then repeat until you rout of of areas on the minimap marked as objectives. That should yield the victory screen.

Instead of having a single protagonist you control a squad of four. That means larger hitbox. The corridors just snake around, the rooms are often small and the game has a focus on AoE management which is unfortunate.

A core mechanic of pineapple smash crew is the slow speed of your bullets, their limited range, and the bullet sponge nature of everything. So you are expected and reliant on, finding grenade consumable powerups and using right click to toss them.

Each grenade behaves differently, some are best detonated manually, others not, while some of them will require more input, such as rockets that will land then activate their fuel thrusters and fly forward until they detonate. Each squad member carries only one grenade, but the game autoswaps them for you whenever one is used allowing you to spam right click if needed.

There are also a lot of explosive red barrels around. So there are a lot of explosions around and given the 4 squadmate, cramped areas situation you can easily end up taking a lot of damage from the AoE's due to the reliance on grenades.

Every single crate contains a small amount of coin so there is an implied incentive to attack everything. But on top of the slow speed of attack, the bullets have limited range, and operate on an energy gauge that needs to be refilled by autoregen. Think of it as a weapon cooldown. That means breaking crates gets tedious.

Would had been good maybe as a minigame that is part of a bigger game. Like if this was some space pirate game and this was the ship boarding section. But as a standalone title it just does not offer enough. It is more like a demo or a showcase than a game.

Conclusion: While the game is responsive and has a basic charm to it, the little banter between the four voxel soldier and the constant repetitive recycled nature of the experience leaves me unsatisfied. Lack of Xbox360 pad, no real RPG or progression elements, no story and no freelancer aspect either. Play a proper twinstick or a proper dungeoncrawler is my advice.