Even if you have never seen the Brandon Lee movie, even if you have never heard of the comic series or anything even remotely related to the Crow; it is universally believed that you will still hate this game. Game? Did I say game? I meant void. This is devoid of any quality, fun, coherence, story, or pleasure of any sort. Calling this a trainwreck would be giving it entirely too much credit. How could Acclaim look at this and just say “Wow, this is something we can release! For sure!”
Whatever their reason, they released it, and this is what we have. The first thing we see when we put this into our Sega Saturn (as a means to punish it, borderline abusing it) is the background. The background is literally the only slightly endearing quality about this whole game. That’s right, it’s got a pretty good gothic quality about it, and would have been suited for a much BETTER game. That’s it, that’s all of the good nature I have right now. Time to take off the gloves and put on the CHAINSAW RRRRUUUMMMRUUMMRUMMRUMM!!!!
The very first scene is nice to look at for three seconds, then you realize that your character does not move the camera. It’s a fixed position camera, much like Resident Evil, only very poorly done (if that had not been obvious already). Your character will be at the most awkward angles imaginable, and you will be expected to fight random deadbeats. These guys have the worst sound clips with some of the most repetitive dialogue that will cause you to regret having eardrums!
Not only can you usually not see the action as it’s happening because of the camera, you also have to be in the most perfect spot in order to have any sort of hit detection. Sometimes you’ll hit them, but most of the time, you’ll get pummeled. The graphics do not help in the very least. Your character looks blocky as hell (moreso than normal) so measuring his arm’s length like a normal human being is useless. Your arm can punch straight through your enemy, but it’ll be read as a glitch 99.9% of the time. The enemy will be unharmed and then beat you senseless, making you die.
Weapons are, like the game itself, useless. The camera angles constantly hide these improvised street fighting weapons from sight. Even if you pick them up, you will soon drop them when your opponent knocks you on your ass for the millionth time. It doesn’t matter if you are close to the camera, or a single blocky pixel in the background, your hit detection is nonexistent. Your movement speed and direction are literally all over the place.
Hit detection is awful, but the bad guys’ detection is A-Okay! Their hits smack you in the face and some of them have guns! Yeah! They have guns and throwing knives. So while you’re getting pummeled up front, some guy in the background will blast your ass and make you die. Don’t bother getting the gun, you will only shoot air.
Alright, so if you’re not convinced this is one of the worst games on the Sega Saturn, then by all means, find a worse one. Then don’t play the worse one and play something with Spawn in it instead. This has been on more than one "Worst Saturn Games" lists, and even some worst games of all time lists. There is literally no excuse for this. Much like all of the movies with lazy directors that should never have been made, one QA expert should have looked at this from one single angle and put a stamp of “not ready” or “dump at Chernobyl” directly on it. As said in the Saturn’s 10 Least Favorite Virtua Insanity, this game is literally unplayable. It is not worth getting use to the delayed, clunky controls and any effort to get good at the game is effort better spent playing E.T. on the Atari 2600. Yeah, I said it. Virtua Fight me.
