It's impossible to talk about Crashlands [$4.99] without first talking about how it came to be. Last year you may have read the remarkable story of Sam Coster, one of the three brothers who founded developer Butterscotch Shenanigans, and how he fought off cancer?twice!?by the time he hit his mid-twenties. When Sam was diagnosed in 2013, Bscotch had already released a few mobile games from their fledgling studio, and two of them, Towelfight 2: The Monocle of Destiny [Free] and Quadropus Rampage [Free], were reasonably successful. They were in the midst of creating their next game, an endless runner called Extreme Slothcycling, when Sam received an official diagnosis of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and knew he'd have one hell of a fight on his hands if he wanted to survive. Faced with his own mortality, Sam decided that a silly endless runner (even if it DID star sloths on motorcycles) wasn't the type of game he'd want to leave as his final legacy should the cancer win. Sam turned to his brother Seth during a design meeting and said, "I don't want Slothcycling to be the last game I make before I die."
Sam told Seth about the game that he had dreamt about making, a game that might not be the smartest idea in terms of making money but one that would be meaningful and provide Sam with an escape while dealing with cancer treatment. That game was Crashlands, and it was an extremely ambitious goal for a team of two?three when third brother Adam joined in?to make. Heck, it would...