Flynn: Son of Crimson (Xbox One)
Flynn: Son of Crimson is an action platformer, but it might be more accurate to call it a combat platformer. While many action platformers use enemies in your way as obstacles you trounce along the adventure, Flynn: Son of Crimson focuses on giving you quite a few attack options. A dodge roll, combo attacks, and special magics all give you a bit more to do when an enemy is blocking the way to where you need to be, and with many of them having decent health bars and strong hits you are incentivized to pick your moments in the quick but involved encounters. A nice balance is found between having to spend a little time working down a foe and not being bogged down with battle after battle as you explore, but it also means when the bigger battles happen you get to pull from a strong set of skills you’ve honed along the way.
However, when Flynn’s adventure begins, he has very little to work with. Not even aware of the crimson energy within him that will power his magic and transform into his weapons, he lives an idyllic life with a large dog named Dex. Dex is the guardian spirit of the land though, and when a strange girl named Rozia comes and pulls the power out of Dex, Flynn steps up to try and help get it back, tapping into his latent power for the first time in his life. When he heads off to reclaim Dex’s power though, he begins to run into the corruption caused by an otherworldly force known as the Scourge, its dark power a far greater threat that Flynn works towards tackling as well as he grows more aware of what his crimson power can do. You’ll encounter a few characters and villages along the way with some silly personalities to briefly speak with, but besides pointing you towards the next required activity they’re usually fairly simple. Instead, it’s the exploration of Flynn’s reason for having the crimson power and the nature of the Scourge that comprise the more interesting elements of the plot, the setting becoming a bit more memorable thanks to the pivotal reveals presented when those topics come up.
The main way the crimson power will manifest is a set of weapons that you’ll be able to freely swap between as you explore the side-scrolling stages of Rosantica. While it’s not too surprising to learn the heavy axe is slow to combo but powerful to hit with and the sword is a faster but weaker option, the weapons you acquire are a bit more layered than such simple advantages. The crimson claws, when used to attack in the air, will let you remain airborne while attacking, a great option for the aerial enemies you come across. The axe’s power is the only way to smash through some defenses, but enemies in the game can also be stunned if you land enough hits on them, meaning you can wear someone down with a faster tool and then go for the big damage with your axe. At first when you’re just fighting goblins, bees, and aggressive plant life you won’t really need to be so strategic with your weapon picks and the dodge roll’s brief invincibility and smart movement does mean you can just make a certain weapon work as your only tool in many battle situations. However, you are given a good period to acclimate to the fact that even basic enemies won’t flinch when hit, have a brief indication they’re about to attack so you can dodge, and will hit quite hard if they do land their attack. You’re in charge of your own health restoration too, the player breaking green crystals as they explore to build up the power needed to activate healing bursts.
Many encounters end up being rapid little skirmishes where you are watching your enemy and trying to get in your attacks swiftly and safely, only the more beefy beasts and warriors really meant to kept you held up for long. There are times where an enemy might have a key or you’ll be locked in an area until you beat everything present, and these usually give you the room to have the kind of involved battles where you’ll need to put in a bit more work to succeed. Enemies fought in this way may have better range, short little combos of their own, or moves with special reach likes magic swords that stab up from the ground so that staying out of their weapon’s range isn’t always a guarantee of safety. The knight archetype is usually used for these tougher fights and while it has its variations it could have been interesting to see some other enemies iterated on, some like the snail surprisingly tough to crack and packing pesky projectiles to make them a surprise danger. Different level types do start to bring in new foes, your adventures across Rosantica going from the forests of your homeland to an undersea kingdom, the frigid mountains, and even a mushroom-infested land with acid rain and zombie-like slime creatures roaming around. While the goblins also make quite a few appearances across all area types, there are times you can move right past a foe you don’t wish to fight if you feel they’re too abundant. Crimson energy serves as your reward for winning a fight though, this going towards the incredibly valuable upgrades to your attacks like new techniques or increases in your power.
The boss battles are definitely where you get to have the most fun with your wide range of skills and options though, and most major areas cap off with a fight with a special warrior who guards some of Dex’s pilfered power. These fights have more mobile opponents like a toxic marksman firing poisonous shots all around the arena or a knight whose watery arena conducts their electric attacks, the player given far more to consider in order to survive against these more capable foes. Unfortunately, while Rozia is a recurring boss fight as well, the game weirdly enough gives you a pretty easy way to invalidate her danger. You have a crimson meter you gradually build up through combat that can be unleashed to make you attack incredibly fast and with high attack power. The special warriors that cap off areas tend to have moments where they might jump out of reach or health bars big enough to handle even when you unleash the power on them and some fights even drain your meter when they start to make sure it’s not too much of a crutch, but Rozia can be easily taken out with a single crimson meter charge and not much thought. Most of the small skirmishes in a level won’t ask for whipping out this ability so it’s likely you’ll reach her with a full bar too, but it seems like the game let you pull this off for a story reason because she envies that power specifically so it sacrifices some interesting fights for something a bit thematic.
Most of your boss battles in Flynn: Son of Crimson will be good tests of your skill, as will things like the challenge stages where large groups of enemies appear in waves to see if you can last without any chance to rebuild your healing energy. Flynn: Son of Crimson isn’t all about the combat though and it wisely breaks it up a bit so that you don’t get tired of slicing your way through goblins and knights. You acquire some magic attacks that do serve a purpose in battle hitting foes from afar, but their low damage and the weak statuses they apply show their real purpose is towards navigating the puzzles in your path as you explore. Fire, ice, and electricity interact with the world in different ways, and there are other tests to be found like navigating a forest by way of a riddle, outrunning icy boulders, or riding Dex through dangerous terrain once she’s healthy enough to adventure a little. Some areas will have a completely unique concept that the game toys with for a while like a gliding leaf and then it puts it aside to never use it again, this actually helping it avoid too many repetitive ideas in the navigation so that usually you’re being stimulated either by some new and dangerous foes or some platforming gimmick that is making you think and act in new ways.
One somewhat weak idea does emerge in the form of the Scourge incursions, your progress sometimes interrupted as an old stage is covered in the dark purple energy of this malevolent force. These reuse the same area design from the stage it’s infesting but introduces new more dangerous foes who strike faster and come in dangerous groups to make the area feel truly hostile. It is often wiser to avoid these fights, especially with some Scourge areas having a further complicating factor like a persistent floating axe that will swipe at you if it can catch up. While asking you to often scramble through a stage more than take your time fighting small battles like usual, that also means you aren’t too involved in this deliberate retread of old ground. There are some secret paths to uncover in previous stages that give you better reason to revisit old stages, but the Scourge levels will interrupt everything without really being too exciting to go up against.
THE VERDICT: Flynn: Son of Crimson’s layered combat can make encountering even a simple enemy a quick but engaging little scuffle, and with the tougher foes and bosses to really test your mastery of it, the action in this side-scroller provides a satisfying and compelling reason to take this particular adventure. The Scourge stages perhaps needed more oomph to justify their presence, but the puzzles and navigation during the regular levels also bring enough variety to test different skill sets, ensuring that Flynn: Son of Crimson won’t wear itself down just by having a consistent focus on enemies putting up a decent fight.
And so, I give Flynn: Son of Crimson for Xbox One…
A GOOD rating. The fights are definitely what give consistent life to the exploration of Flynn: Son of Crimson’s world, but it has a hearty backing from the actual platforming as it keeps introducing new mechanics to set its areas apart. That does help ease some of the sting of seeing the new area also has goblins skulking about who won’t fight differently then before, but the speed of the smaller battles also means they get to be a bit engaging without being totally demanding. A few seconds to take out a foe and then move along to do some careful maneuvering around a platforming gimmick makes progress in Flynn: Son of Crimson brisk and entertaining. It would have been nice for the Scourge stages to be more than lightly retooled stages and to have Rozia more like a rival who gets better over time rather than a foe you easily wipe out with your super mode, but you also have the stages that hinge on something new like riding Dex for most of it or using the gliding leaf to add some fresh new concepts to the adventure. The different combos for the weapons and your growth as a fighter makes those moments where you face a strong boss or take on a challenge stage gratifying pay-offs to all the gradual work in taking on regular foes throughout the journey. There is some room to make this more of a textured world if the characters in town did more than joke or provide some guidance and aid, but there’s still some intrigue in learning about Flynn’s power and the Scourge so the story does have some presence beyond just supplying some reasons for why things are happening.
Flynn: Son of Crimson did take around five years to develop and underwent a shift away from exploration-focused platforming in that time, so perhaps that is why we get a good amount of goblins instead of more consistently novel enemies, but it doesn’t weigh the game down much thankfully. The game still provides new battles and baddies as you get deeper in as the changing environments ask for you to engage with brief mechanics that set that area apart and challenge you in a slightly new way. The fleshed out and frequent action gives it that extra zest that keeps the adventure engaging, the different levels of involvement based on your foes smoothly distributed to keep the combat an enjoyable cornerstone of Flynn’s heroic journey.