Creepy Road

When I was a kid, we didn't have game trailers and Let's Play videos. We had to rely on still images found in poorly-written magazines. As a result, I rented a lot of games that looked good on paper but ended up being crap. Creepy Road is the kind of game that would have caught my eye back in the day. It's an over-the-top run 'n gun shoot 'em up with a polished art design, great sense of humor and memorable hero. But I don't care how good it looks in still images, because Creepy Road is an action game that will thoroughly disappoint the moment you pick up the controller.

Creepy Road tells the story of a middle-aged trucker named Flint who can't wait to get home to the love of his life, Angelina. But luck is not on his side tonight, as he crashes his truck outside of town after narrowly missing a psycho bear. This sets up an action-packed adventure that sees our hero shoot his way through circus clowns, trained animals and a whole bunch of angry senior citizens.

This is a light-hearted run 'n gun shooter that reminds me a lot of the Metal Slug series. The idea is little more than to walk left to right and survive the onslaught of increasingly silly bad guys. You do this with a wide assortment of weapons, including the usual shotguns and missile launchers, as well as fun novelty weapons like a gun that transforms the bad guys into piles of poop. The good news is that you can hold a bunch of weapons at once and even throw grenades and Molotov cocktails at your foes.

On paper, Creepy Road is the kind of game I should love. I'm a big fan of not only the graphics, the cheesy story, the wide variety of guns, the goofy bad guys and the constantly changing backgrounds, but this type of action game in general. So understand that it comes with a pain in my gut when I tell you that this game is a mess.

There's not one central problem that ultimately ruins Creepy Road, but rather a whole bunch of smaller issues that play into each other to create a frustrating shoot 'em up from beginning to end. A good example of this is the hit detection, which is all over the place. This is one of those games where you'll sometimes lose health for no reason. Some of this is because the enemy's shotgun blasts travel a lot farther than is indicated, but it's also because the hit detection feels a bit off. I found that I was constantly dying out of the blue, and that's never fun.

By itself, this would be annoying, but couple with the equally bad checkpointing and you have a real problem on your hands. My issue isn't that the game is challenging, that I can handle. But the game seems to delight in the torture of seeing you replay huge chunks of the level over and over again because you'll get killed by a single cheap hit. It's not fun when you lose a substantial amount of progress because a guy off screen hits you with a single grenade. And that kind of thing happens constantly.

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It doesn't help that Flint is a stiff action hero that is generally hard to control. He just kind of lumbers around and shoots in only four directions. He doesn't have any special moves and is terrible at navigating platforms, something you'll spend a lot of time doing over the course of this lengthy adventure. And worst of all, he has a hard time switching weapons on the fly. Cycling through the different guns is a slow and not always responsive process that increases your odds of dying in every single shootout. This is not the way a shooter should control.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Creepy Road is how boring it is. I pointed out that it takes a while to switch weapons, but that's not the only thing slow about this game. Just one example of this comes when our hero decides to take to the sky by riding on a rocket. This was supposed to set up an exciting shoot 'em up section where we weave in and out of laser traps while firing at airborne enemies. But instead what we get is a stage that often feels like it's in slow motion. I kept rushing the right side of the screen in hopes of getting the thing to move faster. But fast and exciting is not on the menu for this shooter.

Between the cool visuals and a wonderfully varied assortment of guns, there are things to like about Creepy Road. Unfortunately, most of what's good is undone by the terrible gameplay, slow pace, frustrating cheap hits, bad checkpointing and dull level designs. The problem isn't that the game is disappointing or broken, but rather that it's boring and not much fun to play. With so many fun and exciting run 'n gun shooters on the market, I'm having a hard time recommending Creepy Road.