One thing that indie games have managed to do, when made correctly, is to help point out that just because games are inexpensive they don’t need to abandon being innovative or well-designed. If you’re able to come up with a decent hook, looking at the likes of Downwell or something like Switch ‘n Shoot as examples, you can keep every aspect of the experience relatively simple and yet still engaging. There’s unfortunately another side to the budget space though, and that’s games that don’t come to the table with any real ambition or spark of potential greatness, they’re just hoping to do enough to make a buck. That’s roughly where Bucket Crusher comes in.

In the game you’ll take control of a construction vehicle, built to slowly chip away at and then destroy a structure of blocks of some kind. Don’t think of your target as something more fun like a building though, where it would observe physics and allow for you to work on making it collapse, here the blocks are independently stuck in space in some way, only falling when you’ve agitated them. Your initial rig is pretty limited in reach, power, and capability, and this sets the stage for the very repetitive grinding you’ll have in store for you. Each new level will start you out with a new structure to destroy, with them sometimes looking vaguely like woefully out of date memes, and all of your capabilities once again nerfed. So you’ll start again, doing relatively minimal damage, trying to collect all of the bricks you can, then upgrading, and grinding more… lather, rinse, and repeat with very little variation outside of what you’ll destroy.

Just to add a little insult to injury, I’ll again rail against the blatant inclusion of DLC for a game that is so incredibly basic, looking to extract even more money for a game that already struggles to justify its own purchase price. Given the lack of depth in the experience, hoping that people will shell out some more cash for some variation on aesthetics before they figure out how limited the experience is feels pretty gross. If you’re just looking for something akin to a title you’d play on your phone while paying attention to something else this could work, but even among its bare bones budget brethren this feels weak by comparison.