Too Long; Didn't Play: Crimsonland

Sponsored By: It appeared on my hard drive one day without me knowing how. Or I got it in a bundle. Definitely one of those.

Requested By: Garion333

Time Played: 42 minutes

SMG review

I'm painting the town red! And paving the roads dead!

Whee!

Gauss Rifle Review

There are games that show you all of their cards up front, which is a gutsy move. You have to be confident that your game is good enough to hook someone if you’re going to dump a premise on someone and say “This is it, have at it.” It would be like a baker going to a national dessert competition and presenting the judges with a plain slice of unadorned pound cake.

That is what I’m told professional pastry chefs call a "Baller Move." No word on whether that’s hard-ball or soft-ball.

That chef had better be darned sure that their single slice of pound cake is the most amazing thing the people on the judging panel have ever put in their respective mouths. It’s got to beat out the person who brought Pâte à Choux with fresh vanilla-speckled cream, and the one who made Rice Krispie treats sprinkled with hundred dollar bills.

But if that pastry chef can pull it off with a simple slice of pound cake, you know that chef knows the job. You know that’s the sort of pastry chef who could add a bananas foster sauce to that pound cake that would make your tongue slap your eyeballs out – the sort of pastry chef who, should they decide to call a chocolate gateau “death by chocolate,” you’d best make sure the restaurant is equipped with either a doctor or an undertaker.

Anyway, when’s lunch?

The alternative, of course, is that the pound cake is actually terrible and the simplicity of its presentation is meant to fool the judges into thinking it’s better than it is. Like when a jazz musician farts into a sousaphone and tells you to listen to the notes he’s not playing.

So a game like Crimsonland can be nothing if it is not amazing or terrible. There is no middle ground available here. The developers nuked that possibility.

Developer 10Tons has, in either case, found a fan in me. I’m a fan of both ends of the spectrum. I don’t even mind that they shamelessly cribbed the cover art of Duke Nukem 3D.


Crimsonland is a top-down, dual stick shooter in the grand tradition of Smash TV and Maximum Carnage. You play a masked character with a torso that can twist 360 degrees independently of which direction the legs are facing, and who is plunked down in desolate, empty levels to face a whole alphabet of evil creatures, from aliens to zombies. You start with a pistol but soon you’ll find weapon drops and power-ups that make the game more fun and more interesting. I favor the shotgun, personally, but a close second is the rocket launcher. Because I’m stealthy like that.

Now, it wouldn’t be the 21st century if there weren’t experience points and RPG trappings, but Crimsonland does something a little different. You start every level from zero and level up during the course of the level. Each time you hit an experience point milestone you get to select a perk. Sometimes the perks make you reload faster, sometimes they make you run faster, and sometimes the perk lets you pick four perks.

Pro tip: Always pick that last one.

I like this MOBA-like approach to leveling, because it means you’re never in a position around level thirty where you picked the wrong build and therefore cannot beat whatever’s in front of you. The levels get harder and harder, but you know you’re starting from zero every time, so there must be a way to get through it.

The controls are absolutely among the tightest examples of dual-stick controls I’ve ever played, and I’ve spent a lot of time playing dual-stick shooters in my life. Everything is as natural and responsive as you’d want it to be.

The graphics are difficult to judge, owing to the size of anything on screen at a given time. It’s like an exceptionally pretty RTS, if that makes any sense. The characters and monsters are tiny on screen, but they’re all well animated and generally look cool. The environments are on the bland side, but frankly if you have time to look at the floor texture then you need to bump the difficulty up a bit because you’re not getting the full experience. It would be like swallowing that slice of pound cake without chewing it.

So is Crimsonland like that ballin’ pound cake that needs no garnish, sauce or filling? Yes. Yes it is. Crimsonland is an excellent example of what I like to think of as the Pure Game. It is a mechanic boiled down and served in a glass thimble because at that concentration it dissolves metal, melts plastic and causes wood to spontaneously combust.

Seriously, they should cut this with something. It might burn out someone’s beta receptors.

Will I continue to paint the town red?

Heck yeah at all. I’m not entirely sure why I’m not playing it right now.

Oh, right. Work.

Is it the Devil Daggers of games that are, more or less, Devil Daggers?

It is not as ventricle-clenchingly terrifying from the get-go as Devil Daggers is. Crimsonland expects you to get through the first few levels before it ramps up into something less than fully possible. It’s a comfortably challenging difficulty curve, rather than one intended to grind you into powder in 20-second increments.

So, no. While it occupies a similar space to Devil Daggers, it cannot match Devil Daggers for difficulty. At least not in the first hour.

Comments

Pound cake, eh? Didn't expect to be reading that.

So glad you finally played this! Pure Game fo sho. Love this game. So simple, so effective.

Hate the spiders that split into more spiders when killed though. Those levels ... can go to hell.

I don’t even mind that they shamelessly cribbed the cover art of Duke Nukem 3D.

I dunno. The stance may be Duke Nukem, but everything else is definitely Doom.

I'm curious if twin-stick shooters are some sort of new Indie wave of games, the latest trend, or if they're just always there because it's easier to make a top-down twin-stick shooter at a budget than an FPS.

ccesarano wrote:
I don’t even mind that they shamelessly cribbed the cover art of Duke Nukem 3D.

I dunno. The stance may be Duke Nukem, but everything else is definitely Doom.

I'm curious if twin-stick shooters are some sort of new Indie wave of games, the latest trend, or if they're just always there because it's easier to make a top-down twin-stick shooter at a budget than an FPS.

Well, Crimsonland was originally released in 2003, so this is just a remake of that game plus some new modes.

But, yes, making a functional twin stick shooter is quite easy. One of the versions of Unity had a top down shooter as the tutorial on how to code in/with Unity.

This game came out when I graduated high school/started College?

...

I don't know if that ages me or the game.

ccesarano wrote:

This game came out when I graduated high school/started College?

...

I don't know if that ages me or the game.

Wait, you graduated high school in 2003?

I don't know if that ages you or the game, but it sure as hell ages me. Jiminey Cricketts I'm an old man.

Honestly, I usually assume fellow goodjers to be a couple years younger than they actually are. They're all just so much less cynical than I am.

And of course, the cover for Duke Nukem was a parody of the original Doom cover art:

IMAGE(http://www.nag.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/doomcover.jpg)

garion333 wrote:

I'm curious if twin-stick shooters are some sort of new Indie wave of games, the latest trend, or if they're just always there because it's easier to make a top-down twin-stick shooter at a budget than an FPS.

Well, Crimsonland was originally released in 2003, so this is just a remake of that game plus some new modes.

But, yes, making a functional twin stick shooter is quite easy. One of the versions of Unity had a top down shooter as the tutorial on how to code in/with Unity.[/quote]

What Garion said. There's been quite a few indie twin-stick shooters, particularly on the XBox during the XNA heyday, but few of them broke into widespread consciousness.

Such a wonderful game. Their newest game, Neon Chrome, is also a blast.