Crossbow: Bloodnight

Genre: First-Person Shooter

Players: 1, Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Crossbow: Bloodnight is a First-Person Shooter released on PC in 2020 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021. This game has players fending off hordes of monstrous enemies in an enclosed courtyard, trying to survive as long as they can before being overwhelmed by enemies.

One thing will strike you immediately on starting up Crossbow: Bloodnight – it looks fantastic. The game runs with a high resolution and at a silky-smooth framerate (I don’t have exact numbers, but I suspect this game runs at a steady 60FPS), with excellent textures, good lighting, and decent character models for its monstrous enemies, with zombie-like and werewolf-like enemies, as well as more original-looking monsters like a bat-spewing tentacle-flailing pod-like… thing, all backed by fittingly dour, moody music. Suffice it to say, this may be a budget-priced release, but it doesn’t look like a budget game. And just to make things even better, the loading times are surprisingly swift, and the game only takes up 568MB of your Nintendo Switch’s limited memory space.

The gameplay here is pretty solid too, if a bit simple. Players can hold down the right trigger for a constant, rapid-fire stream of arrows, or tap it quickly for a shotgun blast. The left trigger can be used to fire an explosive projectile, but doing so takes a moment and slows you down, making it quite the tradeoff if you want a big blast. You’ll need to be constantly moving, too, as enemies spawn everywhere and can quickly take you down if you’re not constantly evading them and taking them down at least as fast as they propagate. To assist with this movement, you can tap the L button to dash. There’s also a “Rite of Cleansing” special attack that players can use to slow time for a moment and do massive damage, but that operates on a long cooldown.

Here’s the thing – this game doesn’t have much to offer in the way of variety. You fight in one location that doesn’t change, the weapons you start the game with are the only ones you’ll get, and the game only has six basic enemy types to throw at you. In addition, this is a tough game, and the goal of lasting as long as possible will make it tough to survive for more than a few minutes at a time before being downed. Currently, the top player on the leaderboards managed to hold out for over 36 minutes, which seems outright insane to me.

The other issue is the lacking features in this game. There’s no multiplayer (co-op would be a wonderful addition), no ability to change your control layout, no difficulty settings. There is also the fact that this game does absolutely nothing with the Nintendo Switch’s unique hardware features. In particular, there’s no gyroscopic motion controls here, which is a shame.

However, while Crossbow: Bloodnight is limited in its scope and options, I think it largely succeeds in what it tries to do. That a game looks this good and plays this well for $5 is absolutely crazy. And while this is absolutely not a game you’ll want to play for more than a few minutes at a time, it seems perfectly-suited for play sessions where you just want to shoot things for a few minutes in between other things.

tl;dr – Crossbow: Bloodnight is a First-Person Shooter where players fend off hordes of monstrous enemies in a courtyard trying to survive as long as possible. While this game doesn’t provide a lot of variety, depth, or features, it looks fantastic, plays well, and its tiny $5 price tag more than makes up for what it’s lacking. This is not a game to get if you’re looking for something deep you’ll want to play for hours. But if you’d like to blast away enemies for a few minutes, this is an outstanding way to do so at a phenomenal price.

Grade: B

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2021 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Most Efficient Use of File Storage Space

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