Insufficient Funds: Crazy Planets

Insufficient Funds is a weekly article in which we feature a free, or very close to it, piece of media that you can enjoy without overdrafting your bank account.

Facebook has become a vast landscape of crap. I can't sign in anymore without having to block at least 3 different applications from inviting me again. So I pretty much just ignored all the games, assuming they were complete crap. Then I watched an episode of Co-Op that covered a slew of Facebook games and was surprised at how good some of them looked. Since I started doing this weekly free/cheap things article, I thought I'd focus on one of them this week, Crazy Planets...

Here's the short review: Its Worms with social networking tacked on. In case you never played Worms, it's pretty simple. You've got your team of little characters, the enemy has theirs. Run them around the map on your turn, and aim their cute, little weapons and the enemies cute, little heads. Don't die.



Worms is one of my favorite series. I can always do with a little Worms, which is why I immediately tried this game out when I heard about it. Besides the basic Worm elements, Crazy Planets has rounded maps, planets... duh. Then there's the social networking aspects.

Which leads me to my problems with the game, or at least with my experience with the game. You see, I add just about everyone I even remotely know if Facebook suggests them to me. So I have a lot more friends then most probably do, and I use the term friends loosely. Still, only one of those people is playing Crazy Planets.

Without having other friends of yours playing the game, it gets pretty boring. You start off with enough resources to upgrade one of your weapons, but after that your on your own. In order to upgrade things, you need items that can only be obtained via cash money payments, or from friends that are playing the game.

On top of this, the game is designed to keep you playing for a long period of time in short bursts. The definition of casual. If you research a new weapon, or upgrade one, then it takes a real life time span of 24 hours before you can use it. That is, unless you want to fork over some of your real life dough to get them instantly.

Then there's the walls, the figurative ones. You hit a lot of these. For instance, it was becoming increasingly difficult to progress through the game without a new unit under my command. So at some point I just had to grind a level over and over until I was a high enough level to recruit a new person.

Now, it's not letting me continue to the next set of levels that I have been up to for 2 levels. I have to grind out one more level before I can go through. It's moments like these that get very boring when you're playing the game as much as I am. If you were playing it over the span of a month rather then the week that I spent with the game, then it might not be so frustrating.

In the end, it's a perfectly adequate game. Using your actual friends for allies, and having their faces plastered onto the characters bodies is entertaining enough. If you haven't played Worms, you might easily mistake this game as amazing. Myself having played the vastly superior Worms series on countless occasions, it's hard to ignore the flaws inherent in a Facebook ripoff of it. It's still a fun distraction for the free price tag though. And I have an arcade cabinet and a 2001 Monolith on my planet, you can't beat that.