Crab Champions

The median playtime among the hundred most-helpful negative reviews of Crab Champions is 62.4 hours. The maximum is 666.

That number reframes everything else on this page. Nobody in this corpus is complaining that the game is bad — they're complaining that a game they've spent weeks inside was changed in ways they didn't want.

The actual argument

Difficulty appears in 26 of the hundred negatives, RNG in 25, balance in 22. Underneath those is one recurring grievance, in 15 reviews, from players with an 84-hour median: successive patches nerfed what made it fun.

A 269-hour player: "About 100 hours in this game, have been having a blast with it… Until the 'final patch' was released containing a ton of nerfs and making the game overall a whole lot worse." A 225-hour player in late 2025: "It used to be fun. Most of what made it fun has been nerfed/changed in the name of 'balance.'" A 155-hour player on the newest difficulty grind: "I genuinely hate the grind for Prismatic."

Those complaints cluster around the game's own update calendar — 3 in 2023, 5 in 2024, 6 in 2025 — with the 2025 group landing right after The Island Update in November added a difficulty tier above the previous ceiling.

This is the tension in every long Early Access: the developer keeps tuning, and the people who mastered version 8 discover they're now playing version 11. It's a real cost, and it's worth knowing if you're the sort of player who builds mastery rather than dabbles.

What it isn't is a decline. Recent English reviews sit at 99 of 100 positive, and 2026 has produced only nine negatives in the sample, with a median of three votes apiece — no current revolt by any measure.

Why almost everyone likes it

Because the shooting feels wonderful. You grapple, slide, dodge and fire in one continuous motion, and the game is built around chaining that movement rather than taking cover. Gunplay and shooting terms appear in 15 of the hundred negatives, mostly as praise before the balance complaint arrives.

The build system does the rest — stackable perks and weapon modifiers that produce genuinely absurd combinations, in the tradition of Risk of Rain 2, which ten negatives name directly. That's the twelfth game today whose critics reach for a specific comparison, and here it's flattering.

For NZ$14.75 with no DLC and no purchases, from one person, that's a lot.

The achievement curve shows it has depth to spare: 109 achievements, the most common at 80.8%, the median at 16.4%, the rarest at 1.5%.

Three years in Early Access

Eleven numbered Early Access updates since April 2023 — Variety, Elemental, Anvil, Island — each with hotfixes. That's a steady cadence for a solo project.

In March 2026 the developer posted a status update that's worth crediting for its candour. On the next update: "it's still cooking and I like to make sure each update is really worth returning for rather than rushing things out too soon," with a Spring target and an honest caveat that a new baby made a firm date impossible. On the bigger question:

I know the game has been in Early Access for a few years now and I do want to actually finish it up instead of endlessly iterating and changing mechanics.

That's the right instinct, and it directly addresses the veterans' complaint — endless iteration is precisely what they're objecting to. The beta branch is updated weekly in the meantime.

Compared with the other long Early Access games in this library — ULTRAKILL at six years, BeamNG.drive at eleven — three years with eleven updates and a stated intention to finish is a comfortable position.

The verdict

Crab Champions earns an 8.5. The movement and gunplay are excellent enough to carry a game twice its price, the build variety rewards long play, and one developer has supported it steadily for three years without asking for another cent.

It falls short of a 9 because its progression tail is where the friction lives: unlock grinds that its most dedicated players resent, enemy design that several call unfair rather than hard, and a balance philosophy that has repeatedly reset what worked. Progression scores a 7 for exactly that.

Buy it, especially at this price. And if you find a build you love, enjoy it now — historically, it may not survive the next patch.