Crimsonland is the answer to prayers of those wanting to bring back the good old gorefest days of running and gunning.
If you just liked what you've heard in that first bit, you'll love Crimsonland.
The game controls like you'd expect a top-down game to control: You use the arrow keys (or WASD) to actually move your character around. You can aim with the mouse, and your torso will turn separately from your legs allowing you to fire in any direction while running in any other direction. While this at first may seem awkward seeing your legs running one way and your torso facing the other, it doesn't matter, because after about thirty seconds in the game's survival mode you won't be paying attention to anything but the beasties.
Speaking of the game's modes, the retail version includes several acts with a handful of quests, called unsurprisingly the Quest Mode. In the Quest Mode you fight back different waves of foes; for instance, in the first level you'll notice your entire goal is simply to eradicate everything on the screen. However, later on you may find yourself having to bust monster spawning objects while the waves chase you around.
When you beat a level in the Quest Mode, you will have either unlocked a gun or a perk. The guns are self-explanatory. Perks however are almost like level-ups in a role-playing game; when you kill enough monsters in any game mode, you gain a level, or as they call it, "Pick a perk". Perks will give your lonely little fellow all sorts of strange superhero-esque abilities ranging from slightly raising your reaction time by slowing the rest of the game down, to firing your gun faster, to emitting a radioactive aura. The game has some 50+ perks and there are no limits to which ones you want to use; you can use them all at once if you last long enough in a single round of Survival Mode.
Survival Mode, speaking of, is exactly what it sounds like. You begin with just a pistol and your serene surroundings. However, within the first five seconds, aliens start toddling into the screen. Their trickle is slow and guns drop from most of the starting monsters, as it's not wise to be caught in the mid-late game with a pistol. From there it's a nonstop killing spree, and it's not unusual for the entire ground to be 100% coated in blood about ten minutes into the game. Survival Mode's entire purpose is for a high score, but you may find yourself going back to it much more often than Quest Mode because of the hectic, nonstop nature of it and the ability to stack up tons of perks and acquire a sweet gun.
The game looks good, but slightly blurry. It's 3D accelerated but uses 2-Dimensional sprites for all of its artwork; you can crank the resolution up but it generally doesn't help much. Even still, what's there is plenty clean enough and it works. And somehow, just somehow, it never gets boring watching a Nuke bonus pickup explode or see a flurry of plasma from the Plasma Shotgun mow down a crowd of pissed off spiders/aliens/zombies.
Crimsonland sounds great. All the gunfire is nailed nicely, and shotguns especially sound like they're packing a nice kick. The music in the game is mostly hard metal to accompany your bloodshed, and it certainly gets the job done. Though it can get slightly repetitious, there are in fact places to download different music, but sadly there's no way to use your own MP3 files as the game will not read them.
Overall there is absolutely no reason why I wouldn't recommend Crimsonland to someone, especially being that it's a budget title. It gets running and gunning down to a beautiful messy science and the result is ultimately very rewarding. The feeling of being surrounded by impossible odds only to pick up Fire Bullets is a true joy. You may not know what I'm talking about, but pick up Crimsonland, and you will.