REVIEW: CRIMSON METAL

Clearly inspired by the almighty Quake, but as an FPS-Creator product, there isn’t much of anything good here.

Steam: Released
Type: Single-player
Genre: Action, FPS
Developer: Madbox Entertainment
Publisher: Madbox Entertainment
Release date: 5 May, 2017

A bad tribute to the classics

It’s clear that this game tries to pay homage to the great old-school shooters, or schooters, like Quake and Doom. It has the look and the fast-paced gameplay, but everything else just breaks down. Enemies spawn behind you while the messy graphics make identifying an enemy from far away nearly impossible. The AI is just bad with only one difficulty option.  There are long loading times even on SSD, and the levels are short and uninteresting.

Gameplay Video

The game looks like a blast from the past.  I could easily see this being somewhere at the beginning of the century, or even from the 1990’s. After the long loading screen, the first level started and I got handed my first weapon, which actually looked  pretty good.  I had high hopes but quickly found my first reaction was totally wrong. The game went downhill as soon as I peeked around the pillar and got shot from somewhere that I couldn’t pinpoint. I tried to look around but soon got the game over screen. After a couple of tries, I noticed a small figure high on the second floor, and then another on the other side of the room. They were really hard to spot at first and my energy level went down pretty fast. After clearing the first room, I almost opened the door to the next and was again ambushed, this time from behind. Yes, from the room that I had already cleared an enemy spawned behind me and had a few good shots from his machine gun straight into my back. So, I started again. It always feels cheap when developers use tricks like that. I didn’t hear any sound that would have indicated a spawn, no doors opening, no teleportation sounds. He just appeared behind me.

Another thing that certainly added to the realism but took a while to get used to, was playing with only a manual reload. If you emptied your clip mid-fight, it stayed empty until you hit R. It took a few deaths to start remembering that one.

Easy to spot when you know, but right at first when you don’t really have time before your energy depletes…

The controls themselves are adequate, and the overall pace resembles its idols, as does the difficulty. You can’t take many hits, health kits and ammo boxes are scattered here and there. There is a general clunkiness and difficulty in identifying enemies.  It makes playing needlessly arduous and takes the fun out of the equation.
While the weapons feel powerful and look good, it does not compensate for all the other shortcomings this game has. Levels are really short and linear, even the secrets don’t really offer much challenge and the AI is simple. At one time, I was standing in a room, right next to the bulletproof glass, and suddenly an enemy spawned somewhere again and started looking for me. I didn’t notice him until he was standing directly in front of me, just at the opposite side of the bulletproof glass, and he started shooting at me. I stood there amused for about 30 seconds, waiting to see if he’d stop and come through the door which was a few steps away from the glass. He never did, and never seemed to run out of ammo either. There are also bugs when after dying you spawn back at the start, but you’re unable to move, except looking around with the camera. It’s a minor annoyance ,yes, but still. I didn’t experience any game-crashing bugs or any sort of graphical glitches.

Seriously, he just stood there shooting.

Should you buy it?

NO. At the time of writing the discounted price is 4.68€, the original price seems to be on par with Quake 1 and 2.  If you’re looking for a brutal and enjoyable old-school type of shooter, buy either one of those and skip this completely. Or, if you’ve already played those and are looking for more of the same, skip this one completely. This should be totally free-to-play.

Written by
Ejl
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