Crimson Alliance Reviews

We have rounded up another small batch of reviews for Certain Affinity’s XBLA hack’n’slash Crimson Alliance, all pretty much favorable towards the title, although not without some criticism.

Co-optimus awards a 4/5 to the title and 4.5/5 to its co-op mode.

So what are the drawbacks to the game? Honestly, I find them to be few and relatively minor. I played through the game with a couch co-op buddy in probably 6-8 hours (the first half on normal difficulty, the second half on hard difficulty), which some may find short, but that’s usually what I expect from an arcade game. Since the replayability is fairly high (going back and getting higher scores, more gold for items, or trying out a different character), I don’t find any fault with the game length. The story is certainly nothing to write home about (and quite sparse with not so great voice acting), but I’m not the sort that looks for story in these types of games. The game may come across as very easy for veteran gamers at first, but turning up the difficulty (the game has 5 levels of difficulty, starting at (easy) and ending at (ridonkulous) – yes, really, (ridonkulous!)) can certainly remedy this. I ran into some graphic stutter a couple times, but nothing too major.

Does Crimson Alliance redefine the genre or do anything ground-breaking? No. Is it a streamlined, slick-looking, accessible dungeon crawler experience? Yes. Crimson Alliance may not entirely satisfy the genre fans that really want the endless farming runs for loot, better loot, and epic loot, but it’s a great game to sit down and play casually, or to convince a friend or significant other who may not play games very much to hop into for a quick 20 minutes.

Ripten, 7.0/10.

I don’t particularly think Crimson Alliance is a bad game by any means. It’s well polished and offers a great experience. I just expected a lot more. From the lack of depth in being any sort of an RPG to the incredibly short single-player campaign, Crimson Alliance fell short of being an awesome game. It’s a good, short, action (RPG) but nothing more.

The pricing model does help if you plan on purchasing the game. For $10 you can get the entire game and only choose one of the three playable classes, or for $15 you can experience all three. If you were expecting Torchlight with 4-Player co-op, you’ll be sorely disappointed. If you’re looking for a real dungeon crawler, go pick up Torchlight instead. If you’re looking for a good hack-and-slash action game to play over the weekend with your friends, Crimson Alliance is for you.

GameInformer, 8.75/10.

There’s little choice in how you improve your character’s powers, but your limited selection of attacks are all fun to utilize; they only get more exciting as they grow in strength. Battles grow extremely intense on the later levels, especially on the higher difficulties. If you’ve got buddies along for the ride, you should definitely try to tackle the more challenging settings and get the appropriately higher rewards that come along with them.

Every aspect of Crimson Alliance works together to engineer a fun cooperative hack n’ slash. From the quick and easy inventory to the excellently designed levels and rewarding combat, this is the downloadable game to play with friends this season.

Finally, Tom Chick from Quarter to Three offers a harsh piece on the game’s microtransaction model:

I don’t really mind the overall pricing model. The three heroes are sold separately for $10 each, or for $15 for all three. That’s an interesting enough alternative to the usual price.

But then I get to the stores between each level, where you spend the gold you’ve accumulated to buy gear. Gear is a bit more meaningful than the usual action RPG, because there’s no leveling. Each character always has three attacks, but the attacks get more powerful based on which items you equip in each of a character’s three slots. Some equipment even gives you extra health, or a bonus tweak. This wizard’s orb might improve your direct flame attack and add a few points of health, but that wizard’s orb will boost your electricity crowd control attack as well as add a slight chance of critical hits. Simple meaningful choices without too much fuss. Now let’s go eff up some more goblins!

But what rubs me the wrong way is that each store includes a nag for you to buy 40,000 gold from the Xbox Live store. In the overall calculus of the game, 40,000 gold is an unbalancing metric butt-ton of money. It will basically unlock all the best items for each of your three slots. I’m guessing it will let you effortlessly plow through the levels, pretty much guaranteeing silver medals all the way.