Krazy Ivan is one of the shortest, shallowest games of all time but is slightly redeemed by its cheesy brand of humor.
In terms of story, Krazy Ivan has a ludicrous premise to say the least. The manual contains a bit of backstory that can easily be summarized as so: Ivan, pilot of the player's mech, is a documented claustrophobic paranoid schizophrenic who is entrusted to save the human race from alien invaders, going so far as to describe Ivan as "the perfect candidate" for such an intense burden. It may go without saying, but this premise seems flawed from the start. In any case, the story is told through cIassic live-action cutscenes with all the horrible acting one can expect from mid-90s video games. However, the low acting quality coupled with a ridiculous script somehow makes every cutscene slightly humorous, if only for the first time.
Gameplay is where Krazy Ivan falls short of expectations, especially in terms of moving the first person camera. Although this game might have been made before the analog controller, the button mapping is inexcusably cumbersome. While moving is accomplished through the directional buttons as always, tilting the camera up and down is done by pressing the L1 or R1 buttons. The stiffness of the camera, as well as its ridiculous sensitivity, will usually end up dealing out a few cheap deaths over the course of a playthrough. Weapon variety is also an area in which Krazy Ivan falls short, boasting only a small handful of weapons in its arsenal. What makes the weapon selection worse is that the last two weapons will kill nearly every enemy in around 20-30 rounds, which means that the already easy difficulty becomes even more of a cakewalk.
Enemies in Krazy Ivan take little to no skill to eliminate. Although there are some slight differences in the various boss characters that must be cleared to advance to the next level, such as fast-moving foes and airborne adversaries, the method needed to dispatch each is brainless: simply strafe constantly and shoot until it explodes. Speaking of strafing, it is accomplished by tapping the R2 or L2 buttons. However, unlike most games in which the button only needs to be held, the strafe buttons need to be tapped constantly or else simply holding the button down will cause a slight jerk in either direction. The need to constantly tap these buttons in order to avoid attacks is difficult to get used to and feels far too clunky.
By far the most disappointing aspects of Krazy Ivan are the ultra-short length and lack of environmental variety. In fact, a single playthrough of the entire story takes little over an hour with no real difference in level design. Each location is the same hilly, featureless landscape with only color schemes to differentiate one zone from another. Such lazy design makes navigating through some of the later levels not only headache-inducing, but also mind-numbingly dull. Although there are bits of foliage (trees, mainly) along the levels, there are so few of them that the entire game seems like a series of mindless engagements across variously colored deserts.
Overall, Krazy Ivan is a game that's best played through once and forgotten, if only for the cutscenes. Although the said scenes have some humor to them, there's nothing to miss that other, much more interesting titles can provide. In fact, given that somebody has probably uploaded all the cutscenes on a video hosting site, there isn't any real reason to play Krazy Ivan at all.