Wednesday App Review: Crossy Road

Today, I got hit by a car while crossing the road and I wasn’t even mad. While playing the Frogger-inspired app Crossy Road, I’ve been hit by a car, flattened by a semi, drowned while jumping across floating logs, hit by a speeding train and carried off by a giant eagle. As it turns out, I’m terrible at ushering various animals and characters across an insane amount of highways and rivers. Fortunately, this app is not only slightly addictive but extremely forgiving. And it’s free. screenshot2Crossy Road was released in November of 2014 for Android and iOS, and is also available on the Amazon app store. The idea behind this nostalgic 8-bit app is pretty simple: cross as many roads as you can and collect coins to unlock new characters. That’s pretty  much all there is to it. The app is pretty popular right now with around 20 million users and while it does have in-game purchasing, spending real cash definitely isn’t necessary. Unless you’re REALLY terrible at the game (like I am), you can probably earn most of the characters with in-game currency. If you DO have bad luck in acting as a digital crossing guard, the app will cheerfully suggest you spend $1 – $3 on a new character to make yourself feel better. But don’t give in! You can earn a “gift” of coins to buy new characters for every few minutes of game time and the coins aren’t really that hard to get if you’re patient. The app itself is not super large as far as file sizes go and only takes up 21 MB, which is far below the average for a game. It doesn’t require any data to function and worked just fine when I turned off my Wifi and data. Of course, I expect that app could use data, as there is a sort of social aspect to the game where you can not only share your top score (and a snapshot of your most recent death) with friends, but also post your scores via Google Play to compare with others. Signing in to the Google Play via the app is, however, optional. Still not convinced this ridiculously fun game is the way to go? Check out this demo video showing the app. Yep, that’s pretty much all there is to it. The game has a surprising 50 unique characters which, as you can see, are all different and react differently when being smucked out by fast-moving vehicles. The chicken explodes in feathers. The unihorse neighs in a very disgruntled fashion, and the ball player’s square basketball goes flying in a very comical way. Maybe I’m a little deranged, but I’ve never been so happy to be hit by a car. My high score is an embarrassing 42. I’m not even really sure how I got that high, to be honest, but I’m not going to complain. Instead, I’m going to go get hit by a car again. You, on the other hand, should go download this fun, time-wasting app. Do you like this app? Know of an app you’d like us to review? Let us know in the comments!]]>

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