This is one of those reviews where I really wish steam had a "mixed" or "neither" option to use. But I suppose one has to choose whether to recommend a game or not at the end of the day.
TL;DR: I would recommend this on sale like I got it, but not at it's full asking price of $15. The game has great presentation, hit or miss humor that can feel mean spirited, an interesting but flawed combat system, with the killing blow being that it is a poor roguelike due to a lack of content and balancing.
So, Crush the Industry is a rougelike (sorta) deckbuilding game that's half Earthbound JRPG combat, half Slay the Spire. The premise is simple: you are a game developer trying to make it in the games industry.
Now, I'm exactly the target audience for this game. I love Slay the Spire. I love JRPGs, with Mother 3 (the sequel to Earthbound) being one of my favorite games ever made. I'm also a game developer myself who's published games. A junior, sure. But I've been around the block enough to get most of what this game is putting down.
The art and presentation is excellent. The sprites are well made, perhaps a bit over-animated at times, but very well made and imaginative. There's clearly been a lot of work put into that and all of the psychedelic, earthbound-esque backgrounds the game has. The music in particular stands out. It's just good.
Next comes the game's humor. This is pretty subjective, obviously. But I'm gonna try to explain it anyway. Crush the Industry has 3 main jokes. These jokes are: Video Game Reference, Gaming Culture/Consumer Parody and Game Industry Parody. Most of these are fairly standard. Do you like earthbound? Well, then you'll get most of the video game references. There's a bit of Chrono Trigger as well.
The gaming culture jokes are more unique to this game's premise. They're fairly front loaded, actually. The first area of the game is entirely based around customer support, so most of your enemies are rowdy customers. Stuff like Neckbeards, Toxic MOBA Players, Angry Parents, Literally just Dr. Disrespect, etc. It's pretty much every single basic, universally disliked caricature within the gaming space. It's shockingly safe, only going after the easy targets.
This more or less extends to the Game Industry Parody jokes. The vast majority of these are mostly just generic buisness bits, with some more specific gaming references. I laughed at these too, but again it feels a bit mean spirited. I think a bit more so, because I can't help but wonder who the real people are behind the caricatures. Like, we're making fun of the inexperienced junior for... trying to help you and making things worse. Really?
If the whole game was sardonic, I wouldn't care as much. But there's one post-victory monologue from Buff Homoerotic Gabe Newell (don't ask) where he mentions the game was made by a two-person couple team, and says the line that made me want to write this review. "It's a tough industry, so we've all gotta help each other out." It's a nice sentiment, but it's the only positive message in the entire game. Like, I don't feel the positive vibe after you've just spent half the game disparaging your (presumably) former co-workers.
But back to more objective things than humor. The gameplay. The thing that I, a fellow game designer, consider something I can comment on.
The combat is good on paper. The combat system is fairly unique in how it handles the deck building aspect, using a set of skills that you can shuffle mid battle. I have no complaints with it in concept.
The problem is that, to quote one of the game's enemies: "Pro gamer announces... that your game is too easy for [her]!" You can see that I have 21 hours in this game. Do you know how many times I lost? Maybe like, 4, 5 times. I have at this time already obtained the "Golden God" achievement, in which all 5 characters have completed the game's highest difficulty outside of nightmare mode.
Now, I do consider myself skilled at these types of games, so I'm not going to say that it needs to be made harder. The problem is in the way that it's easy: it's easy in a boring way. Even at Corporate Hell, there's no room for a healthy in between where you're winning, but having to work for it. The most tense part of any run is either the first floor because you don't have a complete build yet, or the third floor because the boss in that floor is genuinely harder than either of the final bosses.
The main culprit is one of the mechanics it has taken from Earthbound: rolling health. Your health physically rolls down during battles, meaning that no amount of fatal damage can kill you until you hit 0. If you beat a fight, it starts rolling down. This already means that going for aggressive strategies is good because it doesn't matter how glass you are if you kill the enemies before the health rolls down to 0.
But it gets worse with characters who lean into it. There are a total of I think 3 different passives you can have on any character which passively slow down health roll, with two characters having additional ways to slow it down. That's absurd when they stack. This, combined with rests restoring a whopping 75% of your missing health means it's very easy to push through with your raw meat alone. Just give me some drained stacks when I take additional fatal damage. Please.
With that all that said, I don't think the low difficulty was that much of a negative in the long term, because realistically, I wouldn't have bothered getting Golden God if it was. And that's because of the game's fatal flaw; it is a poor roguelike.
It simply lacks the content necessary, and this is AFTER the "content complete" update. There are only 3 boss options on the first two floors, and 2 options on the last two floors. Within the 3 boss options on the lower floors, one is just a recolor variant option of the prior fight. These bosses just aren't unique enough or interesting to make me want to keep fighting them. Hell, I can't even get the third floor variant to show up, I've fought him... once. At the game's highest difficulty, you also fight both final bosses at the end in sequence, so...
This extends to normal enemies as well. There's maybe like, 5 unique enemies for normal encounters, which are just shuffled together. There's not even an easy/hard pool mechanic like STS, so encounter difficulty varies wildly. I once fought an enraged parent and a toxic moba player, then went into another fight... with just a single enraged parent. That seems wrong.
Pathing is also non existent. You are given one room, then two to choose, then three to choose, then it repeats. Making one choice doesn't impact what you get in the other path, so there's barely any planning to speak. It's usually just "take a fight or harder fight", "rest or upgrade", and "take a fight or an event."
Flavor is also really messed up in a way that impacts gameplay. Dodge reduces an attack's damage to 0, but doesn't actually stop status effects. That makes sense within the rules, but not any sort of flavor. Burn makes sense; it deals damage at the end of a turn, then decreases. Poison? You'd think it does the same thing, but it just adds it's stacks to damage taken by the target, then decreases. Nitpicking? Yes, it is. But flavor matters when you're trying to memorize these mechanics.
I could go on, but you get the point. Even if the game was hard, I wouldn't really like it that much more. It was already starting to wear thin by 20 hours. I don't even want the game to be longer. I'd have rather paid $15 dollars for a 5 hour experience that was consistently fun the whole way through, than pay $3 for 20 hours of just ok gameplay.
Which is why I ultimately cannot recommend it. While competently made, it is not worth the time it asks to go through something that is... just ok. The game also has enough positive reviews as is, so I don't think one non-recommendation is going to kill it dead in the water at this point.
