Pineapple Smash Crew

My first hour with Pineapple Smash Crew had me genuinely surprised that one developer, Rich Edwards of RichMakeGame, pulled this off solo. The game drops you straight into randomly generated derelict spaceships with a four-person mercenary squad and no hand-holding whatsoever. The attitude is essentially: here are your grenades, figure it out. That lack of a tutorial could feel dismissive, but it actually respects you. The controls using mouse and keyboard click into place within minutes, and once they do, the feel of guiding your tight little formation through corridors while the screen fills with robots and aliens has a genuinely satisfying crunch to it. The whole design revolves around grenades as the primary offensive tool rather than the usual backup option. You start with just a frag and a steerable rocket, but as your squad levels up you unlock a surprisingly deep roster: laser grenades that fire straight through walls, warp grenades that suck projectiles and enemies into a vortex, tele-frag grenades that teleport your crew and kill anything in the path, mines, holo-decoys, healing zones, and more. Each of the four squad members carries one grenade type at a time, so cycling between them to match the right tool to the right situation becomes its own quiet tactical layer. The way the game handles squad health separately from a shared ammo bar, and uses credits both as an unlock currency and a continue mechanic, adds just enough friction to keep things from feeling trivial. When you lose a squad, you know it was your fault. The chiptune soundtrack by Syphus deserves a specific mention because it earns it. It has that rare quality of being genuinely upbeat and propulsive without ever feeling disposable. You will catch yourself humming it. The pixelated aesthetic matches the music perfectly, with blocky marines in bright colours and high-resolution explosions that pop against the lo-fi tiles. It is a deliberate visual joke and it works. Where the game stumbles is also where most of the Metacritic criticism lands. The three mission objective types (clear enemies, collect artefacts, move toxic barrels) start rotating before the environments feel meaningfully different, and the single boss archetype gets repetitive fast. The campaign runs roughly three to four hours, and there is only one game mode. No co-op either, which stings given the clear Cannon Fodder lineage. Critics in 2012 were right that the weapons system is strong enough to carry a deeper, longer game. That game does not exist here. Play it in short sessions and the repetition stays mostly in check. Treat it as a sit-down-for-an-evening game and the seams show. For what it is, a debut solo project with an honest retro soul and a weapons sandbox that stays clever throughout its short run, Pineapple Smash Crew holds up as a small, handcrafted thing worth your time. The bigger vision is visible through the gaps, and that is both its charm and its limitation.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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