A fighting game built from falling crystals
Crystal Crisis looks and plays like a fighting game, but the attacks come from puzzle work. Crystals drop in pairs, you arrange them, and clearing groups sends trouble to the other side. The goal is to keep your own board under control while pushing your opponent into a spot where they cannot recover. It is a one-on-one color-matching competition, so every match is a direct head-to-head fight rather than a race against a timer.
Playing together
You can face off against friends and family on the same setup, or take on challengers worldwide through online multiplayer. Remote Play Together is supported, so someone can join in from their own machine while playing on your session. Each of the 20 playable characters brings their own stage, musical theme, voice-acted exclamations, and a set of offensive and defensive Bursts. Quote and Curly Brace from Cave Story, Isaac from The Binding of Isaac, Astro Boy and Black Jack from Tezuka Productions, and Umihara Kawase are among the roster.
Bursts, boards, and options
Clearing crystals and landing combos fills your Burst gauge. Spending it triggers one of 40 unique Bursts, which can save you from a bad board, disrupt your opponent's grid, or finish them off. The grid itself has two unusual rules worth learning early: wrap-around lets you move a falling pair past the edge so it reappears on the other side, and split-the-pair drops one crystal on the left and one on the right. Crystal colors are fully customizable, including a Colorblind setting that makes the crystals easier to tell apart.
Before you start
Single-player modes give you room to practice: Arcade, Survival, Tag Team, and Training, plus a Story mode with branching paths. The match is still one-on-one, so the single-player modes are where you work on your own timing and Burst usage before taking it online. The presentation is polished across animation, effects, music, and sound, and the game keeps its tone light. The advice on the box is simple: never give up, and eat your broccoli.