Review: Too Many Crates (Half-Life 2)

Christmas Day, of all days, proved the unlikely release date of oddball Half-Life 2 mod Too Many Crates!. Could a game that dedicates itself entirely to crate-stacking mayhem be any good? Is stacking and crowbaring crates even all there would be to it? I’ve been playing it, and this is what I think.

Hands-up: I assumed it would be awful. Too Many Crates! is a mod in which you must stack, solve puzzles with and ultimately destroy an astonishing number of crates. Crate puzzles have become a running joke across a variety of shooters – not least the Half-Life series – for being unequivocally awful. Crates are everywhere, destroying our fun, and – oh, look – here’s an entire game about them.

I never was great at predictions, though, and I’m more than happy to admit I got it completely wrong. Too Many Crates! is, in fact, not terrible. At all. Instead, it’s a rather smart, very knowing and often highly amusing puzzle game, which displays a decent amount of thought and even subtlety in its design. This doesn’t feel right. It’s a game consisting entirely of crate puzzles, and it’s – gasp! – really quite good.

It starts predictably enough. You’re Kenneth, ultimate destroyer of all things crate, and you must destroy all of the crates. Suitably preposterous vocal talent over and done with, you’re left to your smashy-smashy devices for a few minutes, as you attempt to free the looming crate factory from its oppressive crate-based takeover. Smash, smash and more smash. And then you happen to look upwards, and there’s a crate stuck to the ceiling.

In this case, the solution is fairly obvious. But it’s the first in a series of increasingly deceptive little brain-teasers in your important race to destroy all of the crates. A short while later, you’re introduced to red crates, which explode when struck. You will certainly die if you hit them with your crowbar, the game helpfully informs you. And things begin to get more interesting. You meet blue crates, which are stuck rigidly in place, blocking doorways and seemingly indestructible. Later still, you meet pink, and green, and yellow, and gold crates, which… well, which you’ll have to find out about yourself. They all serve a purpose, all important in your mission to destroy all of the crates.

I have reservations, some of them pretty serious. The first is that, while the game neatly subverts a lot of what it’s previously set up, at one point it’s possible to back yourself into a game-ending corner simply by following instructions. Destroy all of the crates, you were told. Except, once you find a way of safely blowing up the red crates and spend a few minutes destroying all of them, the game handily informs you that you’re now stuck and will starve to death. Having played Portal, a game with which Too Many Crates! shares a few pleasant similarities, I assumed it was just messing with my mind a little. But no, I really was stuck. Turns out I wasn’t supposed to destroy all of the red crates. I was supposed to use them to help me get into various other areas of the factory, at various other points in the mod.

I understand what it’s trying to do. It’s trying to make you think about each move as you work your way up the high-score table of crate destruction. But to do this so immediately after telling you to destroy all of the crates, in a way that makes you so immediately lose, is a design choice I struggle to get behind. It’s made all the worse by an over-zealous auto-save feature, which made damn sure I had to start the whole game again instead of loading my now-overwritten save at the beginning of the section.

It’s the only time Too Many Crates! pushes you into this sort of inescapable hole, but not the only time it flounders. A section in the middle sees you manoeuvring crates around a conveyor belt system, but – in version 1, at least – it’s broken, moving too slowly and occasionally just moving the wrong way entirely. A patch purports to fix this. I haven’t tried it, as it would have meant starting again for the second time, and initial reports are mixed as to whether it actually fixes the problem at all. The section is still completable, but it requires a different method, one that’s a hell of a lot more long-winded and tedious than the intended route to success.

More fundamentally, the whole thing gradually loses its initial, irreverant charm as it goes on. There are moments of absolute genius – the room in which a robotic voice introduces you to various new crate types, for example, or the time when you meet the factory’s boss – but once you unlock most of the factory, you’ve kind of seen all the best bits. From there, it’s a fairly laboured exercise in clearing out every last one of the crates by increasingly convoluted means. Some of the puzzles really work, and produce the most sublime of ‘aha!’ moments. The solutions to others are obvious, but the route there painfully drawn-out.

But… it’s never awful. And that it’s never awful is something of an achievement for a game about solving puzzles with crates. At its best, it’s borderline brilliant. Seeing the factory open up before you, finally accessing previously blocked areas via your own crate-stacking, puzzle-solving genius, is something that never gets old. Being forced to re-evaluate your methods each time a new crate type arrives is a fabulous piece of evolving game design. Even at its weakest, it largely remains fun, and utterly compulsive. Finally destroying that one-thousandth crate ends up feeling like the most glorious gaming achievement. Even long after the novelty has worn off, the urge to continue remains.

You get the impression that more could have been done with the idea. But what’s here is still an unlikely success, an unassuming gem, and quite literally the best puzzle game about destroying crates that you’re ever likely to find.

Too Many Crates, by AwesomePossumGames, is available to download from its ModDB page. Requires Half-Life 2 to run.