I knew this was going to be bad. Morbid curiosity led me here. Why was this brand new, sealed Switch game so cheap? Why was it that Steam, GameFAQs and HowLongtoBeat all had next to no useful information? I remember playing ‘The Incredible Crash Dummies’ on the Master System way back when. What could possibly go wrong?

Unfortunately, one has nothing to do with the other. In fact, ‘Crash Dummy’ seems to be a 2D re-imagining of the Wii-era 2.5D game ‘CID the Dummy’: a game that was by all accounts terrible and nobody bought. Who asked for a new version to be released in 2015 on PC? Not the three people who reviewed it on Steam that’s for sure. So, then how, really how does this get ported to the PS4 and Nintendo Switch near 4 years later?

I needed a witness with me, so had a buddy over. We put in the cartridge, load up the game and the worst video game cutscene either of us have ever had the misfortune to set eyes upon begins. It continues for what seems like an eternity. Choppy, student-project animation, check. Recorded in a basement audio-quality, check. Grade-school level writing, check. But then, the voice acting. My God, the voice acting. “To inject human DNA into a dummy is the right thing to do! Or is it wrong?”

The worst part of all: this was Twelve Interactive’s second attempt at this! A quick YouTube search shows that the CID the Dummy opening cutscene had plenty of similarities, but with an altered script and animation style. This was their do-over!

What is the story premise? Some strange mix of Mario and MegaMan. The antagonist kidnapped your creator’s robot daughter and you have to rescue her, and you think she’s cute... or something. Who cares?

Get through that, hit the “main menu”. Wait, what’s that music playing? Yes, that’s Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice, except not quite, playing over “main menu”. I say “main menu” in quotation marks because there isn’t really a menu at all. No options, just click play and you’re at the level select. Okay, straight to the fun. One level later, my buddy could take no more. An inauspicious start. We switched to something more palatable, but I was determined to persevere at a later date: alone if necessary.

The next day, here I was again. Ready to give our hero, CID another chance: it’s a budget title after all. Aesthetically, it looks somewhat like a Mega Drive, or possibly a PS1 game. Unfortunately, it plays like a bad Mega Drive game; you know the sort. This is a simple action platformer with basic run, punch and gun play. The problem is none of those things work well individually and feel even worse when done in tandem.

Actions are disjointed with no sense of flow like automatically moving a step in whichever direction you’re facing upon landing a jump. Precision platforming is therefore impossible, in levels that demand precision platforming. You’re never quite sure when hanging off a ledge if pushing jump will launch you up or drop you down. Gunplay is about as satisfying as being shot through windscreens for a day-job and you may be better off switching the sound off entirely. When the audio isn’t glitching, you get to hear the same brief ditty repeated ad-nauseum interrupted only by CID’s asinine utterings.

Speaking of glitches: no bad game would be complete without a gluttony and boy do I have some doozies for you. Falling through platforms, remaining on platforms after they’ve disappeared and the audio screaming in protest occasionally when the flamethrower is used. On 3 different levels, I encountered level-breaking bugs: buttons disappearing or doors swinging shut instead of open. But hey, during the final level both instances where you should fight the mini-boss can be skipped entirely thanks to poor design by first not going near him and second by running past him. So, swings and roundabouts.

The game advertises “16 challenging levels!” Thankfully, there are in reality only 8. The others are 2 tutorials and 6 boss fights, which for some wretched reason are considered separate entities. Now, simplistic bosses, I’ve seen. Hell, 2D Mario mostly still hasn’t worked out how to do a nuanced boss fight. However, these really are something else.

For instance, one has you run to the right side of the platform and press a button to send a contraption across the screen damaging the boss. Okay, now run to the left and do it again. Repeat 10 more times. Don’t worry about being hit, as long as you’re moving that won’t happen. For the second phase, the boss goes up high, so jump on one of the springs that appear and shoot. He literally cannot touch you, so continue to bounce and shoot until the evil robot is dead. But shooting constantly doesn’t help speed things up as someone decided it would be a good idea to give all of the bosses invincibility frames after each time they get hit.

Another has you run to the right, open a few gates while the boss “chases” you for what must be no more than 30 seconds before reaching the level complete screen.

To sum this game up, I offer two final nails in the coffin:

1. This game has lives, lose a life, you start off almost exactly where you died. Cool. I like that, straight back in. Run out of lives and you seemingly have unlimited continues. Again, fine. When you continue, you start off exactly where you died. So, that means lives are meaningless? Is that hidden philosophical depth or poor design? You decide.
2. Mid-level, I get a phone call: I hit pause. Why am I back at the level select? Yes, you read that right. There is no pause button and trying to pause the game, which you’re going to do multiple times out of instinct kicks you further back than losing all of your lives.

This is a truly terrible game. Yet, I don’t regret my purchase. I don’t hate it. In a way I admire that a game so full of problems, a game so devoid of fun, made it this far in this day and age. Through its awfulness and in forcing my way to the end, ‘Crash Dummy’ somehow reaffirmed my love for gaming and game collection as a whole. It will sit proudly on my shelf forever more, never to see the light of day again.

TL;DR - Don’t buy ‘Crash Dummy’, unless you’re willing to question all of your life decisions that brought you to doing so. Thank you, Twelve Interactive. You are the heroes I never knew I needed.