Review for Crimson Keep. Game for Nintendo Switch, PC and Steam, the video game was released on 29/11/2018
Nintendo Switch has been a worldwide phenomenon in the field of gaming: the new console of the big N has received money and love from many players, as well as received the interest of many indie developers. Everyone wants to be on the Switch, and Nintendo wants as many games as possible to land on its new console. This then led to the publication of Crimson Keep, first-person rogue-like that lands on the aforementioned hybrid and on Steam. We thought of this short and somewhat bland start to the review for a specific reason: within these few lines is the reason why we have to talk to you today about this - let's not mince words - disaster.
The game isn't mediocre, but something worse: software that, in a perfect industry, should never have passed the quality check in its current state. As you can guess, it will not be a positive review, and probably not even a particularly long one, given that the contents in the title are so poor and malfunctioning that we will soon run out of words.
The adventure with Crimson Keep begins like many others: you are catapulted into a cave with elementary equipment based on your chosen starting class: Warrior, Magician or the classic "naked class". But the incompleteness of the game, at a basic programming level, is noticeable after a few steps. Glissing at the graphic discourse, which we will discuss later, only in the first few seconds do we notice some very serious shortcomings: the invisible walls have no animation when you pass through them, seeming only buggy geodata; the uploads that divide the zones, on the other hand, can either crash the game or continue in an infinite loop.
These are 2 identifying examples of the bad programming behind Crimson Keep. The game is full of bugs of all kinds, ranging from simple and acceptable graphical bugs to enemy AI's that stop working and start running undeterred against any obstacle. Whenever you switch levels, in a dungeon crawler structure that divides the game into distinct floors, separated by a load, you must pray that the game will be able to load the next floor. The success rate of this simple operation is pitiful, we managed to get past the second upload roughly 50% of the time, and within that 50% we still had the same problems with subsequent uploads.
Completing Crimson Keep is truly an odyssey full of impassable obstacles, as uploads will often interrupt runs.. However, this does not exclude us from analyzing the content that is actually present in the game. But even from this point of view there is little to save. The combat system is all in all fun, with the ability to dodge that gives a sense of dynamism to the clashes. Too bad it's integrated into a game that, in addition to being barely functional, is heavily unbalanced.
During the exploration you will be able to find armor that will increase our HP, but wearing them will not increase the HP possessed but only the total life points. This would not be a problem if the game provided some healing, too bad this happens very infrequently, with among other things insufficient healing to restore the damage of two enemy attacks. There is also a level increase system, which allows you to purchase a skill for each level acquired, with a simple and unexpectedly functional system, but extremely limited between the classes that will have, in the end, very similar skills. .
The classes themselves are poorly balanced with each other: the magician becomes useless very quickly since the magic casts are limited and can only be restored through enemy drops that, on time, fail. The warrior is much more useful than the other two, as he starts with a very strong weapon, making it almost useless to play with one of the other classes.
We finish the review with perhaps the most painful note in addition to the upload problem: the graphics sector. Crimson Keep seems like a game stripped of any possible texture. The maximum of the graphics quality that can be found in the game corresponds with what, in any other title, would be a model still loading. The models themselves are among other things very basic and mundane, with constant glitch problems with the environment or other models that lead to embarrassing situations of flying characters, passing through walls or speeding up without any animation.
The animations are obviously very low quality too with many attacks showing obvious missing frame windows.
At the beginning of the review we mentioned the release of Crimson Keep on Switch and Steam: this is due to the fact that, unfortunately, these two platforms have the worst quality check on the market. Crimson Keep is a disaster, a title that should never have been released in its current state, unable to fulfill its most basic functions and deranged in cases where everything works. Steam Greenlight is a thing of the past, but until there is a tightening of quality control we will always see a Life of Black Tiger or, in this case, a Crimson Keep coming out.
► Crimson Keep is an Adventure-Action-Indie-RPG game developed and published by Merge Games for Nintendo Switch, PC and Steam, the video game was released on 29/11/2018
