There is often a misconception that developers gimp superior platform so that they can do justice to another platform which is less powerful. The PlayStation 4 has been mostly touted as a more powerful platform compared to the Xbox One, however this does not mean the system has better games than the latter. But that discussion is for another day.

In an interview with 10tons’ PR Coordinator and Producer, Jaakko Maaniemi, GamingBolt asked whether they see developers using the extra GDDR5 RAM and more GPU compute to churn better exclusive and multiplatform games on the PS4.

“Definitely, simply due to competition,” he said to GamingBolt. “Especially AAA titles will just need to start reaching for the boundaries and then pushing them, simply because some of them will do that and the rest can’t afford to stay far behind.”

Jaakko also spoke about their perspective for Crimsonland and how high end tablets are actually offering higher resolution than the PS4. “Our perspective is quite different, as we indeed target a very wide range of platforms, all the way down to mobile. High end mobile is very capable these days though, and the hardware is refreshed a couple of times a year.”

“I’m not sure if many people realize it, but resolutions far exceeding the 1080p PS4 is practically capable of are quite plentiful in mobile. High end tablets have 2560×1600 screens, for example. That’s a lot of pixels.”

Rashid Sayed: Before we begin, can you please introduce yourself and the company you work for?

Jaakko Maaniemi: My name is Jaakko Maaniemi and I work as a PR Coordinator and Producer at 10tons. I joined the company about three years ago, but 10tons has been around since 2003. We’re based in Tampere, Finland, and there’s nine full time employees in our studio. What’s special about 10tons is that we use internally developed tech to develop for an unusually wide range of platforms.

Rashid Sayed: Can you please explain the gameplay in Crimsonland for those who are unaware?

Jaakko Maaniemi: Crimsonland is a super gratifying, addictive and intense top-down dual stick arena shooter. The gameplay is all about mowing down massive hordes of monsters, splattering ridiculous amounts of blood in the process. The real meat of the game is the Survival mode, where you get to “build” each run from the weapons and perks you’ve unlocked in the Quests mode.

"We use the DS4 touchpad when it's feasible. We support it in Sparkle 2 for aiming, and it works pretty well. Touchpad works in Crimsonland as well, but there aren't many situations where you need that finesse in aiming, to be honest."

Rashid Sayed: Can you talk about the different perks and special abilities?

Jaakko Maaniemi: Perks are basically the core of Crimsonland. Or, rather the way you’re able to figure out different strategies based on how the perks interact with each other, the weapon you have and the playstyle you enjoy. You need to experiment a lot to discover all the nuances and combinations.

Something like a sawed-off shotgun and poison bullets perk is a pretty obvious combination; the shotgun blasts out a lot of weak pellets, but lace in the poison and all the monsters you hit die pretty quick. This will take you only so far though, as sooner or later the rate of monster spawning will just overwhelm you. So what could you add to this to get further? Hint: Faster reloading and larger ammo capacity, for example!

Rashid Sayed: How is the unified architecture and 8GB of GDDR 5 RAM of the PS4 helped development matters?

Jaakko Maaniemi: Crimsonland is a remake of the first game 10tons ever made back in 2003. And even then the game was targeted for quite low end rigs. About 99% of the game code is still exactly the same as it was back then. No surprise then that the Playstation 4 is able to run the game without breaking a sweat, even if we did replace all the graphics and set the game to run 1080p 60fps.

The Vita version runs exactly the same code and graphics, but obviously on lower resolution.

Rashid Sayed: From a developer perspective, do you see developers using the extra GDDR5 RAM and more GPU compute to churn better exclusive and multiplatform games on the PS4?

Jaakko Maaniemi: Definitely, simply due to competition. Especially AAA titles will just need to start reaching for the boundaries and then pushing them, simply because some of them will do that and the rest can’t afford to stay far behind.

Our perspective is quite different, as we indeed target a very wide range of platforms, all the way down to mobile. High end mobile is very capable these days though, and the hardware is refreshed a couple of times a year.

I’m not sure if many people realize it, but resolutions far exceeding the 1080p PS4 is practically capable of are quite plentiful in mobile. High end tablets have 2560×1600 screens, for example. That’s a lot of pixels.

Rashid Sayed: Are you guys using the touch pad controls of the PS4? If yes, can you please explain how?

Jaakko Maaniemi: We use the DS4 touchpad when it’s feasible. We support it in Sparkle 2 for aiming, and it works pretty well. Touchpad works in Crimsonland as well, but there aren’t many situations where you need that finesse in aiming, to be honest. Mostly you’re better off just spraying and praying.

Rashid Sayed: Is it safe to assume that Crimsonland will run at 1080p and 60fps on the PS4?

Jaakko Maaniemi: Very safe. It looks pretty cool with a couple of hundred monsters on the screen at the same time.

Rashid Sayed: Is there a specific reason why you guys are not working on any Xbox One games at the moment? It seems that Crimsonland is not planned for the Xbox One.

Jaakko Maaniemi: Like said, we’re multiplatform developers and our strategy is to support as many relevant platforms as we can. Consoles are a special category of platforms because you need an agreement with the manufacturer to start developing, and I can’t get into detail about those discussions we may or may not be having. Let’s just say Sony has been really good to us, and that’s why we have three games on PS4 and four on PS Vita, with more on the way. Being a Vita developer probably helped us get on PS4 early.

"The game has 60 missions, but that's basically like a warmup for Survival. Or, if you will, the Quests mode is the “levelling” phase where you gather all the loot (weapons) and abilities (perks) that you will need in the “endgame”, which is the Survival."

Rashid Sayed: Most indie developers working with Sony release their games on the PS4 as well as on the Vita. Are there any plans to bring it on the Vita and make it cross buy?

Jaakko Maaniemi: Crimsonland will launch on PS Vita August 19th in SCEA region and August 20th in SCEE region. It’ll be crossbuy, like all our titles.

Rashid Sayed: How many missions will the game have and how are you planning to improve the replay value?

Jaakko Maaniemi: The game has 60 missions, but that’s basically like a warmup for Survival. Or, if you will, the Quests mode is the “levelling” phase where you gather all the loot (weapons) and abilities (perks) that you will need in the “endgame”, which is the Survival. There’s countless hours of entertainment to be had with Survival, both in solo and co-op, as you try to beat your highscore one more time with clever combinations of perks and weapons (and of course the perfect run with a couple of lucky escapes).

Rashid Sayed: Is there anything else you want to tell us about Crimsonland?

Jaakko Maaniemi: There’s a free trial, check it out! You haven’t really discovered what the game is about until you’ve got about 200-250k score in Survival. My highscore is something like 860k, and I’m really impressed by anything past 1 million.

PlayStation platforms have led this indie game renaissance from the forefront, and we’ve had some amazing games as a result- Dead Nation, Journey, Resogun, and Transistor come to mind immediately as great indie games that broke out on PlayStation. The other side of this is, games that were previously big only on other systems, such as PC or iOS, get a new lease of life as they are exposed to a more engaged, mainstream audience on PlayStation. So we have seen a lot of games make their way over to Sony’s newest console and platform.

One such game is Crimsonland, which is a remake of the 2003 shooter of the same name for the PC. Crimsonland essentially sees the player fighting off waves upon waves of enemies, featuring the same kind of quality twin stick shooting action that players might already be familiar with thanks to aforementioned games like Dead Nation or even Resogun to an extent. However, while Crimsonland shares in these basic gameplay similarities with those two games, it does not necessarily share in their quality or high standard of polish. Don’t get me wrong, Crimsonland is technically a good game, with all the right elements in place. It just seems to lack a soul that gives it any overall cohesion, making everything feel disparate, and causing the entire game to feel mechanical, banal, and repetitious.

"Crimsonland is technically a good game, with all the right elements in place. It just seems to lack a soul that gives it any overall cohesion, making everything feel disparate, and causing the entire game to feel mechanical, banal, and repetitious."

This sterile and soulless feeling is perhaps immediately apparent when you see the game’s graphics- you wouldn’t be able to tell what is wrong with them at a glance, as they seem to be 1080p and 60 FPS, with some pretty particle and lighting effects. But you play it a little more, and that’s when you realize, the graphics are just there. They have no identity, they have no charm, and they do as little as possible to get the message across. Visual mnimalism by itself is not a bad thing- Proteus, for example, achieved incredible things with a very minimalist graphical palette- but in this case, it’s indicative of a larger problem.

The graphical style’s issues are enhanced by, and further enhance, the similar issue of banality in the gameplay. Crimsonland is basically a ‘wave’ shooter- you are tasked with clearing out each level of all enemies, taking out wave after wave, earning better weapons (you start out with the puniest gun which only has one, very weak, very ineffective shot), and better point multipliers along the way. It’s tried and tested, the genre is known to be fun, and keeping players coming back, and Crimsonland, in those moments, seems to play well, as you lose yourself in just trying to clear out those enemies before they can get to you.

But then that nagging feeling comes back, and it’s an issue with the game that’s far more intangible than having all the technical aspects in place- the game just feels trite, there’s no escaping it. Maybe it’s because, unlike, say, Resogun, where everything you do is given spectacular context thanks to the game’s presentation, your exploits in Crimsonland are sort of exploited to pretty basic squiggles and lines on the screen, with only the very literal splatters of blood on your screen giving you an idea of the ferocity of the battle the game is probably trying to convey, but it doesn’t actually feel like anything you are doing in Crimsonland is meaningful, even within context of its own game world. The game’s actual story mode doesn’t even seem to have any overarching context (despite the fact that it actually does, it’s just lessened by the triteness of the game itself), rather feeling like just a stringing together of arenas from its Survival Modes.

"Maybe it's because your exploits in Crimsonland are sort of exploited to pretty basic squiggles and lines on the screen, with only the very literal splatters of blood on your screen giving you an idea of the ferocity of the battle the game is probably trying to convey, but it doesn't actually feel like anything you are doing in Crimsonland is meaningful. "

These are just your initial impressions. Later on, the actual mechanical failings of how Crimsonland plays also becomes apparent, as it quickly becomes clear that winning in Crimsonland isn’t entirely up to you.

You remember how I said above that the basic weapon in the game, the one that you start out with, is useless? Yeah, okay, so you need the other weapons to actually effectively do anything, which is fine, that’s how these games usually are. The issue is, unlike other games in the genre, which seem to follow a scaled curve in weapon drops, giving you better and more effective weapons the better you play, Crimsonland’s weapon drops seem to be entirely luck based. You can have a full level of gameplay where you get nothing but terrible weapon drops, which makes the game much harder than it actually is.

I understand what must have been the ostensible purpose for this kind of a setup (I think?): to ensure that players would get to familiarize themselves with all weapons, and then use them all, instead of just sticking to favorites. But this concept is fundamentally flawed for two reasons: 1) this idea only works if all the weapons within a game are meaningfully balanced (they aren’t in Crimsonland), and 2), this is an arcade wave shooter. The point of this game is to kill off the enemies in the most efficient way possible, and yes, that means that players will inevitably gravitate towards certain weapons that they like the most. That’s how these games work.

I don’t know, really. I mean, I guess, like I said, in the heat of the moment, this game can be fun. Unfortunately, overall, it simply falls flat, and when you especially consider the exorbitant price that this game asks for, and the general level of quality of the games on PSN, you sort of begin to question whether you actually, really want this game after all. Maybe you really like arcade wave shooters. Maybe you just want something that can be fun in short bursts and nothing more. Maybe you like the idea of luck based item drops in a wave shooter. If you fall under any of those categories, feel free to go ahead and get Crimsonland. Others, however, may keep a safe distance from this game and rest assured that they are missing out on nothing.

This game was reviewed on PlayStation 4.

Top down arena shooter Crimsonland has launched on the PS4 today, going for $13.99, or EU9.99 in European territories.

“Crimsonland’s reception on Steam in June was awesome. We can’t wait for PS4 gamers to get their hands on Crimsonland. At this time there are no similar games available for PS4 so we think that PS4 gamers are in for a treat,” said Tero Alatalo, CEO of 10tons Ltd.

Crimsonland is indeed unique from other shooters- it channels Quake, and the era of classic arena shooters, but it approaches the genre top down. It has half a dozen game modes, 30 weapons, and 55 unique ‘perks’ (its concession to modern shooters and the expectations they bring with them to the market), four player local multiplayer, and online play over PSN. It is a remaster of developer 10tons’ first game, that was originally released in 2003.

Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage of the latest and greatest games.

Crimsonland, 10Tons’s awesome looking, retro channeling, top down dual stick shooter, is going to be releasing on the PlayStation 4 on July 15, the developer announced on the PlayStation Blog. The PS4 version of the game is, as is the case with most of these indie games coming to the PS4, a port, in this case a port of the PC game which was originally released in 2003.

“Crimsonland is also the game 10tons was founded on all the way back in 2003,” the developer wrote in the blog. “It started as a student project, but soon reached a level of success that a company was needed to support it. The PS4 version at hand is still largely the same game. Sure, the graphics have been replaced with new HD assets, content has been added and design tweaks made, but the immensely satisfying gameplay remains intact.”

Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more information and coverage.