I am immensley interested in this game, especially after the UPF, QL, and Pizza Party videos. The Bomb crew seemed to have a ton of fun, with the exception of the boss fight. What I'd like to know is, has anyone out there spent any hands on time with this game? If so, is it as fun as it looks?

I don't think Crawl is available to the public just yet. I remember Patrick saying he got the build they play from the developer.

Highly unlikely anyone has played it. The only builds out there are developer builds, so the only people who have played it are pretty much the devs, friends and/or family of the devs (or other playtesters), and games press who have preview builds like the one Giant Bomb got. That's about it.

Jeff didn't like the part where the ghosts don't always have something to do, but then I feel like Jeff is also a very impatient gamer who generally doesn't like it when games constrain him in any way, so I generally don't give a lot of weight to his criticisms. Also the devs are thinking of more things for ghosts to do other then just spawn a blob or possess a monster/trap.

@bisonhero: yeah, I figured that it was just a thing where only "industry people" had access to it. And it's my understanding that the devs plan to put it out on early access in around a month. I've just been sitting on some cash that I intend to spend on crawl, however I /could/ also spend it on nidhogg and/or samurai gunn should Crawl not be as good as it looks. Also worth mentioning the devs have a rebalances and new bosses on the way.

According to Steam, I've played 6.7 hours of this - a few sessions with friends spread out pretty far over several months. It's super fun - there's a lot of variety in the monsters and how they interact with each other, and discovering new ways to troll the hero is really satisfying. I remember the first time my friend discovered that the level 2 snake (which dodges out of the way and drops spikes behind it) can be used to evade the hero almost indefinitely - it was incredibly annoying for me, but still hilarious. There's just a lot of really intense moments in the game, like the feeling you get when you aim the minotaur's charge just right and ram the hero for tons of damage. It's fun to be the hero, but being a ghost is actually a lot of fun as well, especially when you have some decent monsters that can work well together to be really powerful. In the Quick Look, a lot of the ghosts are basically just standing around most of the time; I've found that recently that happens much less, as most rooms have plentiful spawns as well as traps.

There are a few things which I don't like that much, though. For one thing, it does seem like it's a bit easy for one player to dominate. One of my friends I play with generally ends up being the hero most of the time, because he manages to deal the killing blow even with relatively weak monsters. It would be nice if there was some way to turn on rubberbanding (or at least give players a handicap). The boss also seems a bit too hard; if people are prepared and coordinated (and especially if they come in with 9 blobs), the screen just gets filled with crazy bullshit and the hero rapidly gets shot/corroded to death while the mouth forms a laser wall so he can't get to the bomb. The last few times I've played, we've used up all our three tries and nobody's been able to beat the boss.

Also, there's quite a bit of content in the game at the moment, but it can still get tiresome (probably what stands out the most is that there's only one boss). That being said, I don't play it often, but every time I do, it seems like the developers have added some stuff, which is always kind of a cool bonus.

One minor thing that I really appreciate is that there's good controller support - most games only support Xbox controllers, and you'd be shelling out $120 for a full set of those. Pooling everyone's controllers together to get four controllers of various types is much easier, though.

Anyway, it's a cool game - if you can get together four people/controllers to play it, I highly recommend it.