I've played this on another platform before, and while I found it somewhat mediocre, I figured it deserved a second chance after picking it up on a good sale.
And... nah. As the kids like to say these days, it's a painfully [i]overrated[/i] game.
My cynicism toward the industry—especially the indie scene, which has been churning out industrial quantities of garbage for years now—has long since robbed me of any patience for swallowing creatively bankrupt, generic copies of games I played decades ago, with not the slightest hint of originality in sight, pretending to be something new—or even a competent recreation of the formula they're ripping off.
[i]Crow Country[/i] is just a generic [i]Resident Evil[/i] clone with a flat map and an isometric camera.
The theme park has its charm, some of the puzzles are enjoyable, and the developers at least have enough self-awareness to inject some humor into the experience. But the game's core design is executed so poorly that, throughout most of my playthrough, the only thing on my mind was that I'd rather just replay [i]Resident Evil[/i].
Combat and resource management are pointless.
On Normal difficulty, you'll drown in so many resources that you might not even notice how clumsily most of the game's mechanics are implemented.
There's no thought put into enemy placement, and avoiding them is trivial because most environments are so wide open and the enemies themselves are mostly harmless.
There is no synergy between the enemies and the level design. While they feature varied and highly inventive designs, they lack distinct behaviors. This is likely why any of them can be placed anywhere, yet the result always feels like the same generic encounter.
At no point in the entire game will you feel even the slightest bit apprehensive about encountering any enemy. Veeeery rarely will you have to make the strategic decision to eliminate an enemy blocking your path and spend resources, or weigh the risks of avoiding it instead. Most of the time, the answer is so obvious and so risk-free that the game never manages to create any tension.
As if that weren't enough, defeated enemies respawn. Worse still, brand-new environmental traps simply materialize in rooms you've already cleared, in a half-hearted attempt to force the player to be a little more careful. It only cheapens everything you do even further.
You can disarm a trap or kill a particularly noteworthy enemy, only for new ones to appear in their place.
Resources, however, do [i]not[/i] respawn. In fact, the game encourages you to waste your "precious" ammunition shooting crates—since you don't even have a melee weapon to break them—in the hope of getting random supplies. If you're already carrying the maximum amount of a particular resource, those items are simply forced onto the floor, where they'll disappear the moment you leave the room.
Naturally, the crate doesn't come back either.
At least the game has the courtesy to let you return and pick up items that were already placed in the environment. Thank you, sir.
But none of this matters, because the consequences of wasting or losing resources are completely trivialized given the enormous amount the game showers you with.
Before i even found my second weapon, my inventory was already overflowing with ammunition for it. Likewise, i was carrying a mountain of healing items that I almost never had to use.
Suddenly it becomes obvious why the game never asks you to make genuinely difficult decisions. It also makes perfect sense that there's no inventory management or storage box. The balancing would completely fall apart.
The classic survival horror formula was elegant because every system reinforced the others. Every enemy represented an obstacle that presented meaningful choices with immediate consequences. The permanence of your actions was what gave weight to every other decision. Carefully designed enemy encounters forced you to choose. Avoiding threats with tank controls and fixed camera angles was a skill you had to develop, and it always came with the inherent risk of making a tiny mistake and potentially spending even more resources than if you'd taken the safer approach.
Crow Country suffers from a complete lack of permanence in almost everything you do—except the things that punish you. It tries to paper over the problem with an overabundance of resources, further undermining any sense of survival.
The result is that combat, resource management, and methodical exploration all feel completely pointless.
It's a horror game without a single drop of atmosphere. And no awful "PS1-inspired" visual style—smothering the screen in post-processing effects to hide how ugly the game actually is—will ever substitute for the tension and suspense that should emerge through gameplay.
Then there's the baffling addition of a free-aim system that contributes absolutely nothing. There's a localized damage mechanic that apparently rewards headshots, but in practice it accomplishes nothing interesting beyond adding an awkward extra step to arrive at the exact same place as the games it's copying.
Not to mention the terrible controls and awful mouse support. Trying to use an aiming system designed for an over-the-shoulder third-person shooter in an isometric game simply doesn't work. Aiming is so sluggish and stiff that, most of the time, you won't have enough time to make any tactical decision before getting hit.
Waiting for enemies to get close enough before firing is simply a bad idea—one you almost never have to make anyway, because you almost never have to meaningfully engage with enemies in the first place.
And I suspect the developers knew how miserable this felt, because they conveniently scattered explosive barrels and similar hazards everywhere, allowing you to bypass the more dangerous enemies. Which, once again, is mostly pointless because they'll either respawn or are ridiculously easy to avoid.
If you think they at least took advantage of the free-aim mechanic to make the environments more interactive, prepare to be disappointed. 99% of the time, shooting anything that isn't explicitly tied to a puzzle accomplishes absolutely nothing. I never found a single alternative solution through experimentation. I wasted plenty of bullets figuring that out—which ultimately didn't matter because of everything I've already mentioned.
On [i]Murder of Crows[/i] (Hard), all of these flaws become even more obvious. This time, the game pairs all of those irritating design decisions with a genuine scarcity of resources, making every decision that already lacked lasting consequences feel even more nonsensical.
Suddenly, those crates the game wants me to shoot become even more pointless. Everything that could be overlooked because of the overwhelming abundance of supplies turns into a genuine annoyance. Not the kind that enhances the experience, either. It just makes the whole game feel even more poorly planned.
Yeah... it's mediocre. Unpolished. Poorly thought out. A sloppy imitation of something the developers neither understood nor managed to reproduce competently. It has a certain nostalgic charm, and it's functional enough to avoid being outright broken, but it brings nothing new to the table, doesn't subvert any clichés, and isn't even a meaningful refinement of an old formula.
A game with no lasting appeal whatsoever. Its ideas are nothing more than poorly executed regurgitations of concepts that were already done thirty years ago—and they absolutely do not hold up under even the slightest scrutiny.
So that's [i]Crow Country[/i].
No joke—between the classic Resident Evil games and the many, many titles that cemented, refined, or explored the genre's creative possibilities, there are easily at least 30 better games I’d recommend over this one without a second thought.
Just grab an emulator and dive into the genre's classics; you’ll be much better off.
