Demon's Crystals

My honest first reaction to Demon's Crystals was that someone stripped Smash TV down to its skeleton and repainted it with anime demons. That is not entirely an insult. The core loop is left-stick moves, right-stick shoots, and you survive waves of undead across 27 levels spread across three horror-themed worlds - a graveyard, a castle, a forest. No complicated button combos, no loadout screens, no pre-match rituals. Just plug in a controller and start dying. Weapon variety is where the game tries to earn its keep. Your default rapid-fire gun is genuinely useless against anything more than a single weak enemy - the game forces you off it constantly, hunting power-up spawns that drop multi-stream spreads, spinning patterns that cover wide arcs, freeze fields, and even a giant-size transform that lets you trample enemies directly. The catch is that all spawns are random and timed. There is no build strategy here. You are perpetually scrambling for the next pick-up before your current one expires, which makes the loop feel closer to bullet-hell survival than a traditional twin-stick with deliberate engagement ranges. The four selectable characters - Adora, Dryad, Anara, Taur - are color-coded and functionally identical at the start, with a leveling system that adds hit points but almost nothing else. If you were hoping class differentiation would open up over time, set those expectations aside now. The mode list is genuinely longer than you would expect for a budget release. Arcade handles up to four players local co-op through the main campaign. Multiplayer offers six local-only modes: Survival, Deathmatch, Vs, Crystal Attack, Capture the Great Crystal, and Kill the Enemies. That last mode name tells you everything about the design philosophy - descriptive, functional, unromantic. There is no online multiplayer at all, which in 2026 is a hard wall if you do not have people physically near you. Remote Play Together on Steam partially patches this, but the experience was clearly built for a single couch. The difficulty curve is inconsistent in ways that feel accidental rather than designed. Some late stages are easier than mid-game ones because enemy counts are lower. Stage hazards like floor spikes have readability problems - they blend into the visual noise during heavy hordes, and you will take hits without understanding the source. The XP system exists and registers numbers going up, but past the hit-point bump, it does not change how any session feels. Couple that with environments that barely differentiate between worlds visually, and solo runs get monotonous well before the final boss trio. For a solo shooter player looking for ranked depth, interesting TTK tuning, or movement tech to explore, this is the wrong game entirely. There is nothing to optimize at that level. But as a fifteen-minute couch session filler with three friends who want to split into teams for Deathmatch, Demon's Crystals delivers uncomplicated chaos reliably. The controls are clean, the frame pacing is solid, and the frantic energy of a full four-player horde run is genuinely fun for a few rounds. Just do not expect it to hold up across an evening.

Fred · Scout Team

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