Crossy Road keeps families occupied

Have you already heard of an app game called Crossy Road? I must admit that I am fairly late to the party, a colleague at work alerted me to the game telling me that his entire family enjoys hopping over various obstacles at night, sitting on the couch together. And in the way those things happen, all of a sudden I saw news features about special chickens to be found in the game, and I recognized the app icon on the phone of whomever was sitting next to me in the train on my morning commute to work. Of course I couldn’t resist taking a peek to see what it was all about.

Crossy Road is an endless arcade game, like games such as Temple Run. There’s no ultimate goal to reach, no end where you can stop hopping. You just want to beat previous scores. Your own scores, the scores of your GameCenter friends, the scores of the rest of your family. For some reason my family member take such things very seriously, so I was fairly certain that once I had them downloading Crossy Road, they would do their utmost to compete with me.

As I’ve mentioned before I’m not a competitive person, so while they are at level 620 in Candy Crush, I have eaten all my candy months ago and got stranded at level 93. So I’m fairly certain that although I’ll enjoy this “pick up and put away” game for a while, they will keep on playing it far longer then I will. Although I must admit to be amused when my Platypus is once again flattened to the side of a truck, or when my Kiwi is carried away by a hawk when I’m too slow.

What makes the game fun, for me, is the huge range of characters you can collect. And they all look so cute, sort of Lego style. The game has just received an update in celebration of the Chinese New Year on Feb. 19, and in honor of that, you will be able to get three new characters. There’s the Fortune Chicken, which is free for a limited time. You’ll just have to unlock it in the game’s character selection screen. In honor of the Fortune Chicken, there will also be a new Chinese New Year theme which features fireworks, lanterns, pagodas, and cards bearing the yuan sign.

Collecting a certain number of those cards unlocks one of the other new Chinese New Year characters, which is the Chinese god of prosperity Cai Shen.The remaining new one is a Chinese dragon named Xi. This one isn’t free, but will cost you $0.99.