Crimson Alliance Reviews and Interview

It appears we have our first two review for Certain Affinity’s first attempt at the hack’n’slash genre, the XBLA-exclusive loot-heavy Crimson Alliance, and they’re both pretty favorable to boot.

Joystiq awards it a 4/5 and calls it a “born-again Gauntlet”.

Crimson Alliance is a throwback to games like Gauntlet, the focus being to get a group of friends together who can hack and slash their way through groups of evil dungeon-lurkers. Players can adopt either mindful or mindless strategies. The mindful groups will seek out the secret areas, while the mindless can kill everything in sight without worrying about navigating confusing skill trees. All upgrades are handled by equipping purchased or discovered armor and weapons using the easily accessible menu that’s bound to the back button.

The pre-made dungeons (they aren’t randomly generated like in Diablo or Torchlight) are well-designed, making dungeon maps a convenience and not a necessity. It’s almost always clear which path adventurers are supposed to take, which, perhaps counter-intuitively, makes hidden areas equally obvious. These bonus rooms will provide gold that will be evenly distributed among the team, and items that won’t be — something that could lead to tension if not playing with friends.

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Crimson Alliance could be a delicious piece of peanut butter and s’mores toast with raspberry jam, it’s just that the proportions are distracting on this first attempt. Basic genre expectations are fulfilled, delivering an approachable, action-RPG dungeon crawl — but with a bit more careful measurement, Certain Affinity could have made this good game great.

Darkstation criticizes the microtransaction aspect of the title, 7.0/10.

You can spend $1 (80 Microsoft points) and get 40,000 gold. At first, this seems like a great deal, because everything the merchant’s sell is well below 40,000 gold. Near the end of the game, some of the items will end up costing 80,000 gold. I ended up spending $5 on in game gold to obtain my high-end gear, for one character. This gold is not transferrable to other characters. If you start a new character, that character will have zero gold. If you want to upgrade all of your characters with high-end items, be prepared to dump about $15 into this game, on top of the $15 the game costs.

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Crimson Alliance is a fun, and well-built game. I have to question if it would have been nearly as fun if I didn’t invest extra money on gold to upgrade my character. Due to this, Crimson Alliance is a major set back due to ridiculous micro transactions. If someone pays $15 for a game, they shouldn’t have to invest $5 more into each character in order to fully upgrade their gear.

Finally, Gaming Irresponsibly offers an interview:

5) Are certain playable characters intended to fill support roles? Or is it a general free-for-all?

Each of the classes has their own way of doing things. But the role they fill depends on the makeup of your party. There’s no one who is a dedicated support role, like a healer, for example. Every character will be in the thick of it, killing monsters, smashing stuff, solving puzzles, and grabbing loot. But your ice spec’d wizard is likely to do those things a lot differently than my shuriken focused assassin, or than our buddy’s lightning wizard might.

6) Can the characters execute combos with each other?

Yes! There are class tandem specific combos for every possible combination of characters. For example, the wizard can freeze enemies, and if the mercenary uses his shield bash on them they’ll slide into a wall and shatter. Discovering how to use different classes together is a lot of the fun of the game. And since you’re rewarded for discovering and using combos like this.

7) Could you explain a little bit more about the uniqueness of each character?

There’s so much to say about this. They all play out very differently. The mercenary is the most melee focused class, of course. His shield can protect him indefinitely, but only from a single direction. He’s got a great killing move that will close distance and do terrific damage. And then there is his whirlwind attack.

The wizard is focused on the elements. He’s got a base fireball, which can be charged up. He can call down lightning, and use ice for crowd control. His multi-pronged ice (if you choose to focus your character that way) is completely badass once it gets powerful.

The assassin. Well, we haven’t reveled much about her yet. She’s playable for the first time at Penny Arcade Expo next week. But she’s all about stealth and manipulating time. Oh yeah, and she throws exploding shurikens because she was trained by ninjas. But tell her to watch out, because TwoBears is after her.