Bloody Canvases | Crimsonland Review

I knew exactly what to expect as soon as I first booted up Crimsonland on my PS4. I was welcomed by a heavy metal guitar riff with drums, and the selection screen looped gameplay in the background showing the endless amount of bloodshed and carnage that awaited me.

With Crimsonland, it’s what you see is what you get. It’s just like every twin stick shooter out there; except it ditches all controls but move, aim, and shoot to present a very straightforward experience. It’s almost refreshing to see developer 10tons blatantly go for simplicity, because it allows the game to have the challenge derive from enemies and your skill rather than by crowding the game with too many elements.

Enemies will randomly spawn on screen and will attract to your character like a magnet, and it’s your job to obliterate all of them. Occasionally, enemies will have spawn pools that produce more and more enemies that will certainly overwhelm you if they aren’t taken care of hastily. Enemies types aren’t original by any stretch of the imagination, and they all have easy patterns to follow. What creates the difficulty is when all different types of enemies like spiders, zombies, and lizards come together and mix their tactics and tendencies that really forces you to make life and death decisions. I found myself contemplating whether I should dash for a nuke power-up, which kills most enemies it touches, or stay back in fear of being mauled before I even came close to the power-up.

After each level in the campaign, you’ll be rewarded with perks (which are used in challenge modes) and new weapons. Some of the most gratifying moments in Crimsonland come from trying out your new unlocked weapons, as the game will always spawn your new weapon at the beginning of the next level. It feels like unwrapping a present for Christmas that you’ve always wanted, and having that instant satisfaction and immediately unloading your new toy onto the incoming horde is a hard feeling to beat.

Some weapons in Crimsonland are practically useless as you progress later on in the game. The balancing of weapons just isn’t there, and sometimes your demise is a product of bad weapon spawning rather than your lack of skill. Getting an RPG weapon or a wide spreading shotgun all but guarantees a victory, but sometimes you’ll be stuck with your lousy pistol or non-crowd controlling weapons that are almost necessary to beat the latter levels.

Crimsonland features five different survivals modes to keep you entertained well after you complete the 60 level campaign mode. My favorite of which, “Nukefism,” challenges you to only use powerups and no weapons to kill as many enemies as possible. It’s nice a tweak to the game’s basic structure, and it changes the pace nice just enough to make the challenge modes a highlight and a must play.

If you’ve got some friends to play with, you can really see how brightly Crimsonland shines when shared with others. Co-op is drop in and drop out, but it’s strictly offline co-op. It may be a tad disappointing that you can’t play this online with your PlayStation Network friends, but playing from the same couch heightens the experience well above what any online co-op could ever come close to in this genre. I played about half of the campaign with a friend, and my overall enjoyment of Crimsonland benefited from doing so. Coordinating attacks, sharing weapons, and assigning tasks to one another made the game have much more depth than what the single player could offer. If you want to experience the game at its best, it’s definitely at its peak with some friends.

Not exactly pretty by any standard, Crimsonland has a bare bones look to it. Every map is practically the same: a simple, terrain-less floor. This might have been intentional, because once you start killing, the whole floor starts getting painted with blood like it’s a canvas. Even with the sometimes comical amounts of blood you’ll compile on-screen, even for a top down shooter, it’s far from impressive. The lack of terrain or any sort of structure makes the game just seem like one long broken record, and while it’s undeniably fun, continuous play while staring at the same bloody canvas can be mind numbing.

Crimsonland is violent, loud, and by the books as far as top down shooters go, but it manages to pool every element together successfully to create a solid addition to the PS4’s library. It may sit just a bit too comfortably within the mold of its genre and countless others just like it, but Crimsonland is unabashedly a bloody good time.

This review is based on the PlayStation 4 version of the game Crimsonland by 10tons Ltd.