Crimson Alliance – Review – Xbox 360

Certain Affinity the guys behind the Halo Reach Defiant Map Pack have created a simple take on the Diablo style dungeon crawler. I was hoping to have a loot filled deep dungeon experience, but I was sadly disappointed.

Story: There are three main characters to Crimson Alliance, A mage, an assassin, and a mercenary. They obviously represent the standard archtypes (ranged dps,tank,melee dps) we have come to know and love as action rpg fans. Each of the three have their own back story and motives for questing to stop the Red Hand and Gulyabani enemies.

Gameplay: The gameplay in Crimson Alliance is rather dreadful. While yes there is only so much you can do in a dungeon crawler it seems Certain Affinity has stripped that down even further. Gone are days of random loot drops and leveling, they even did away with any sort of mana system. Spamming the sprint button to get around and then just mashing face buttons to do spells or talents just seemed shallow and got old very fast. Enemy design is also lacking with about 10 unique designs thats including the bosses. Level design is also incredibly simplistic with little or no thought into hiding secret areas or treasure chests. Micro-transactions also play a role in the game, upon release Crimson Alliance will be 800 MS points ($10), but you only get the game and 1 character, if you want a little diversity in your game it will cost you another 400 MS points ($5) for the Assassin and Mercenary characters. Gold is also able to be purchased, you can get 40k gold for 80 MS points ($1). It just seems a little bit much to me to charge for characters that are advertised with the game and not included.

Graphics/Sound: Crimson Alliance manages to make a cartoon fantasy world look very polished and clean. Spells and attacks go off with no loss of framerate, but again with the lack of overall unique designs in enemys or characters it isn’t too much on screen for the Xbox to handle. Music in the game just like all action rpgs is pretty boring and generic, but that has plagued the genre since the beginning so it was expected. The voice acting is also just very bland with little to no emotion shown in the characters.

Overall: I wanted to like Crimson Alliance, it just fell short to live up to any expectations I had for it. If you are new to the genre or just want some mindless hack and slash with friends it is a much better choice then Dungeon Siege III, but still nothing too great. I did however like some of the many fantasy references in the game such as the sword for the assassin named “Bilbo”.

Pros:
-Great fantasy setting
-Fantasy references

Cons:
-Price structure
-Short main story
-No depth

5 out of 10

Popularity: unranked [?]