Crimson Moon
Review

For a meager price of $20, Crimson Moon delivers a surprisingly solid package. The art direction is stunning, combat is highly chunky, and the game loop is extremely addictive. But poor polish, narrow build variety, and tons of technical issues drag this celestial crusade back into purgatory.

Visceral Combat and Evolving Nephilim

Crimson Moon is at its essence an action-roguelite. You go through procedurally generated missions, decimate demonic swarms, take down bosses, and extract to your Church sanctuary to upgrade your gear.

The combat system is undoubtedly the best aspect of the game. It is fast, highly expressive, and revolves around bloody executions. Taking down enemies rewards you with temporary superhuman abilities for powerful attacks. Once you learn how to play the game, weaving through swarms of vampires, breaking shields, and executing grotesque monsters for area-effect attacks feels very powerful.

Combat, however, is not devoid of frustrations. The camera system, especially when using the target lock feature, is extremely wonky, frequently getting locked on some of the geometry during major boss fights. The animation commitment can also feel a bit awkward; executing a monster freezes your character for about a second, and you cannot animation cancel your attack through dodging. On top of that, the parry system feels very unpredictable and unreliable.

A Roguelite Lacking Variety

The greatest structural flaw of Crimson Moon is an identity crisis of the game as a roguelite. The whole point of this genre lies in replayability and massive build variety created through randomized synergy. And Crimson Moon is not doing well in that aspect.

Firstly, there are no classes in this game: "you are what you wear". Your playstyle is dictated by your equipment; weapon and armor, in particular. The only problem with that is the extremely shallow pool of weapons: one-handed weapons with a shield or two-handed polearms/halberds. Although there is a "boon" system with temporary bonuses that you get during the run, these do not influence the gameplay enough to force you to replace your gear.

Instead of creating wildly different builds being a swift rogue in one run and a powerful spellcaster in another- every run feels remarkably similar. The bosses always appear in the same locations, and the six maps, although highly impressive visually, are extremely linear corridors. This means that despite being a roguelite, you will manage to experience everything that this game has to offer within six to eight hours.

Co-op and Crossplay

Probably the greatest asset of Crimson Moon is co-op gameplay. This game allows you to take on hordes of monsters alongside your friends. And developer ProbablyMonsters made sure that the crossplay works perfectly fine, letting PC players play with their console buddies without any issues. When it works, crusading Gildenarch alongside your buddy is much more fun (and easier).

But "when it works" is the keyword here. Co-op in Crimson Moon is marred by tons of connectivity issues. The players regularly report that there are various desync bugs, where people get booted out of a mission the moment they start it, or even the weird progression bugs, where lore scrolls disappear in the lobby if the host collects them first.

Technical Problems and Developer Response

But probably the biggest hurdle of this game is its technical state. Apart from the co-op connectivity issues, there are cases of hard crashes that completely wipe out the character's progress, resetting it to the point where you have to grind your way up again. And the UI/UX in the game is highly underdone. A lack of clear explanations of the debuff and stat modification system is evident.

Fortunately, the developers are really committed to making this game better. Within two days of release, ProbablyMonsters introduced several heavily requested features such as customizable keys and is fixing camera problems and co-op bugs at a decent pace. It is clear that this is a game that could be polished much better during the Early Access period before its "1.0" release.

Verdict

Crimson Moon is a game with high potential marred by its lack of polish. The art direction is spectacular, the $20 price is more than reasonable, and the core combat loop is highly entertaining (as long as the camera does not give you trouble).