by: Michael Barnes

Developers Certain Affinity, best known for their map packs for a couple of popular AAA shooters, closes out Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade promotion with the co-op focused hack n’ slasher dubbed Crimson Alliance. Existing somewhere along the gameplay paradigm between Gauntlet and Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance and along the quality paradigm between Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerfall and Bastion, the title is sometimes surprisingly good and possibly even innovative but also somewhat lacking in depth and desperately short on variety. As a big fan of anything involving dungeons and crawling, I came away from my time with Crimson Alliance mostly pleased with what I experienced but the single-minded fun of all that hacking and slashing- in this case bereft of the usual loot or experience incentives- also left me somewhat unsatisfied.

In assessing Crimson Alliance, it’s important to keep in mind its focus on hacking and slashing. This is not a game about navigating a dialogue tree filled with complex moral decisions in order to figure out how to bed the elf, nor is it one in which you’ll be assessing which pair of fantasy britches gives you the better boost to your Wisdom stat. I’d actually hesitate to consider the game in the light RPG genre as it’s really much closer to an arcade game than that classification would suggest. Each completed level provides an aggregate score measured in gold with the discovery of secret areas, performing combo multipliers, and other factors weighing in on whether you earn a bronze, silver, or gold medal. This does impart an inherent, performance-based replay value, which is pretty important since the story, characters, and setting are pretty much boring, typical fantasy fare.

There are three characters to choose from- an assassin, a mercenary, and a wizard. Interestingly, the game is being offered as an 800 MS point download with one character or as a 1200 MS point Cadillac model that has all three. Each warrior has a completely unique fighting style and loads of silly book-and-record quality dialogue in the game’s still-frame cutscenes. I’m not really sure you should take characters called Direwolf, Moonshade, and Gnox as seriously as the game wants you to.

Fortunately, the combat system these folks work in is actually quite well implemented. Each has a standard and heavy attack along with a stun or knockback and an evasive maneuver. There are no numerical levels or stats, and new equipment is the only progress indicator. When you buy a new weapon or piece of armor, it simply increases or decreases one or more of your character’s attack abilities, possibly adding a knock-on magic effect. Fighting is fun, and it’s actually more tactical than I expected. Knowing how to work the block and evade are critical, and making the most of special attacks like the wizard’s freeze spell is vital as well. There’s a little more thought required than button mashing, and I appreciated that. Additionally, there are fun things such as exploding barrels and poison gas canisters that the characters can pick up and chuck into the fray for crowd control.

Unfortunately, the game doesn’t really give you anything interesting to hack and slash with this great combat system, with waves and waves of boring, uninteresting peons such as kobold-like critters eager to die and cultists with a penchant for crude firearms and explosives. The waves of fireball fodder are punctuated by a couple of heavies and some completely unremarkable boss fights. I wasn’t really sure I was fighting bosses in a couple of instances. Environments look nice, and there are couple of them, but they’re all more or less variations on a couple of themes.

Fighting through the hordes would be one thing if there were a proper incentive, but the game’s reward system feels like a somewhat misguided design choice. It’s interesting because there is very, very little loot in the game aside from just a few treasure chests containing rare equipment or consumable items such as a deployable turret and an area-effect healing totem. It’s nothing like Torchlight or other modern, equipment focused Roguelikes and there are a relatively small number of items for each class. Almost everything has to be purchased from stores located on the between-levels world map. And most items are astronomically expensive, which means either grinding for money by replaying levels or a couple of Challenge stages or by going to a treasure chest that conveniently offers to sell you 40,000 gold for 80 MS points. How gauche.