Introduction
Not all games need a story to have an excuse to beat up hordes of zombies. Crimsonland shows us that it's a great time without that. But what is Crimsonland? Crimsonland is a top-down perspective shooter that lets you play as a survivor who's in a rough patch. You get to fight hordes of zombies, spiders, ants, mutants, and other things in hell that would want to kill you. This game was created by 10tons and was originally a PC port back in 2003. Now, the game is released on the Nintendo Switch and runs as smoothly as ever. This game brings back the feel of an old 90s title, where you have waves and waves of enemies and you fight them off to survive. 10tons proves that these kinds of games can survive even after a decade of being released.
You can purchase the game on Nintendo Eshop for 13.99$.
Gameplay
Crimsonland doesn't have much in the way of a story, it does have some fun gameplay elements that keep people playing. When you first start Crimsonland, you start on an empty battlefield. You have nothing but your pistol and a slow-moving character at first. The first few levels are typically filled with zombies and other creatures. They won't be fast at first, but once you get to the later levels that will start to change. When you go through levels you also get new perks. These perks give you different abilities, some let you bring power-ups to your character slowly. While others empower you with stronger bullets, you can also get more points. You have a progress bar on each level, this shows how much enemies you need to kill before you can leave the level. These types of games usually have simple controls, press one button to shoot and use the control stick to move. You can also unlock new weapons throughout every stage. There are at least 20 different weapons you can use to destroy your enemies. You can unlock normal weapons like an assault rifle, machine gun, and shotgun. But you can also unlock weapons like a plasma gun, rocket launcher, and guass rifle.
Once you start unlocking more weapons, you will start seeing perks that allow you to pick a different weapon. This can be helpful, especially when you need a rocket launcher and there are hordes of enemies. There are multiple enemies in this game that you can fight, but you have to pay attention to what they can do. Some enemies may be small but can run faster, while other enemies may be bigger, but they are slower in comparison to the faster smaller enemies. It is also important to match the right power-ups with your weapons. For example, you may want to add an electric power up to a weapon that has a fast firing rate, but it may not have a lot of damage. You get to enjoy 60 levels of cool survival gameplay, you can also play with other players if you choose to. You can survive with up to four other players, but there isn't an online mode only local co-op. This is one of Crimsonland's drawbacks, as adding multiplayer would have made the game even more enjoyable. Even with no Multiplayer, the game itself is still fun with a few friends on the couch. Besides the campaign, you get to mess around in a few survival modes. They have different ones like Rush, Weapon Picker, Nukefism, Blitz, and regular survival.
Most of these modes are standard survival modes, they use different conditions from the main campaign. In survival, however, you can keep going for however long you want. It's also the traditional survival you would see in arcade games and old PC games. You can get a high score and have your friends try beating it.
Audio
Crimsonland doesn't have a lot in the music department, but the music it does have is good. The music was composed by Ville Eriksson, it seems he did all the music for the game. There are about four or five tracks for this game and all of them sound good. They all fit the post-apocalypse setting for the game, this is one of the things driving the game forward. Most of the songs in here are rock related, so if you don't like rock songs you may not like the tracks in this game. But I think most people will enjoy the songs, you aren't playing the game for the music alone. The music and gameplay both compliment each other. You may not notice the music as much during the harder fights.
Graphics
The graphics for Crimsonland are simple, it doesn’t have much in the way of detail. You aren't going to have big realistic explosions or have things pop up in the background. But, what you get are graphics that are decent; the graphics are relatively simple to run for any system. For the Nintendo Switch, the graphics were simplistic but a nice touch, I had no issues playing the game in both modes. The switch between handheld and docked modes were easy to play on, the graphics on both sides were nice and crisp. But remember, you aren't getting anything different here, the most you will get in one of these backgrounds is a proper scene change. One of the things that could have your Switch lag, would probably be the number of characters on survival. There would be hundreds and even thousands of enemies on the screen. But besides that, I don't see your Switch lagging unless there was an issue with the actual game.
Conclusion
Crimsonland is a great blast from the past. Some of you may have played the original version while others may have just started playing it on the Switch. While the game isn't perfect, it still has fun and cool game modes to try and explore. Overall, you get a nice game to play in your free time. If you are looking for a deep story or something with great graphics, I wouldn’t look here. But if you want a decent sized campaign, with a different selection of survival modes, then look no further. The downsides of the game are: it can get repetitive, most of the scenes are the same, and there isn’t online multiplayer. This is a good game to play when you are on the go. So if you need something to do, I would pick this game up.
| PROS |
CONS |
| + Simple controls |
– Repetitive |
| + Nice music |
– Only local multiplayer |
| + Solid gameplay |
– Not much variation in background |
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Nick Banks
That cover art remind anyone of anything? Cheeky
Dmytro Voloshyn
Yeah, they mentioned they did it the “Doom cover” on purpose 🙂