Review | Crossbow Crusade

LifeisXbox’s Crossbow Crusade review | Reading the Xbox store description is the first thing I do when I start a new review game. ‪Developer ChiliDog Interactive‬ used a lot of keywords in the description that got my attention, a rewarding fight system, responsive controls, challenging enemies, and 90’s-style pixel art. After playing Crossbow Crusade it turns out that only one of them was right, sadly enough. Making my time playing as a legendary monster hunter far less exciting than I hoped it would be. To compare it with crossbow terms, the arrow retention spring worked half the time and you’ll read why in our Crossbow Crusade review.

This is a short review, our usual the good, mixed and the bad was difficult because of the nature of this game. We played Crossbow Crusade on Xbox Series X.

As you can see in screenshots, visually Crossbow Crusade has something nice going. As a fan of pixel art I was overwhelmingly thrilled by the looks from the playable monster hunter and all the nasty monsters. A highlight is a drivable trolley section where a horse is replaced by a ghost. In this fast-paced section where you shoot and dodge enemies, everything works together to make the game really fun. At the end of the day, it only has a few of these moments. Largely, it is a dull and ordinary experience where nothing special happens and plagued by annoying controls. While the description of the game mentions responsive controls the truth is something entirely different! Frustratingly, the character sometimes doesn’t want to jump and gets stuck in a crawling position. So there you are as a ‘legendary’ monster hunter stuck, preventing you from hitting an ordinary bat. By now, we know that we need to be extremely careful with bats but getting killed by one in a game is rather silly. Especially when the game mechanics are to blame.

The negative overshadows the positive, which is a pity. Some of the crossbow bolt mechanics are fun to play around with. For example, shooting an arrow in a corpse to jump across a gap. Later on, these sections become tougher as bolts vanish into thin air. A challenge from normal mobs is honestly completely non-existent, their attack pattern is easy to decipher and easy to dodge. Bosses are a completely different story though, you’ll have to die and respawn a few times but that’s part of the fun. By now you’ll realize that Crossbow Crusade is a mixed bag with positives and negatives but for the cheap price of €4,99 and playtime of around an hour and a half, it wasn’t the worst time I had on my Xbox Series X but far from the best too.

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