Crimson Dragon

'Crimson Dragon's' Xbox 360 roots show, which isn't to say it looks ugly, but it isn't particularly pretty either. Utilizing an extreme range on the color palette, environments and dragons alike are certainly diverse, but the visual design is muddled, lending to more confusion than vision. While a bit of chaos is always okay, fitting an enemy's purple and cloudy projectile against a dark blue environment background looks dreadful even while lacking much needed contrast. That it bleeds through to gameplay isn't just unfortunate, it's damaging.

More memorable than the music, more memorable than the voice acting, more memorable than the effects, are the sounds that emanated from the right rumble trigger as I fired my dragon's weapons. There's a generically rousing score and some undeniably flat voice acting. The sound effects do very little to arouse excitement nor do they conspire with the gameplay. Those trigger rumbles through, they're really, really loud.

In 'Crimson Dragon' it seems, there aren't dragons, just an incredibly unwieldy turkey. We have a turkey with a fat ass, magically given the power of flight, asked to navigate through a veritable waterfall of chunky gravy without getting wet. If you do make it through, you're asked to do it again, but this time with extra salt and sugar pouring along the gravy. Finally, after retries, augmentations to the turkey – it's ass is ever-so-slightly less fat – acquired by capturing that salt and sugar, you're finally given free reign of a stage. Only the turkey never learned to fly anywhere but straight, so the boss at the center of the stage is literally doing circles around you while you barrel roll into turkey oblivion.

But hey, you can always buy some revival gems, even mid-mission, and tumble your way through the entire game.

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