Developer: Triangle Studios
Publisher: Triangle Studios
Platforms: PC, Mac
Tested on: PC
Cross of the Dutchman – Review
Sometimes, you come across a game that actually has historical value and is based on a true story. Boring! you might say, but then there’s Cross of the Dutchman. Cross of the Dutchman is an action adventure game with roguelike elements that will catapult you back to the 16th century as a farmer. But not just any farmer, you’re Pier, and you don’t want to cross this Dutchman.
Story
Cross of the Dutchman takes place in the 16th century in Frisia, an area that’s torn apart by war. Several factions are trying to conquer the land in order to increase their power, but the ordinary people just want peace. You play as Pier, and together with your family you live on a small farm outside the city. Quickly enough, you find bandits on your farm who try to mug you. No wonder, everything became more dangerous once the Saxons arrived.
The Saxon soldiers are desperately trying to capture the towns you hold dear, but the people have had enough. Together with the help of the townsmen, you decide something has to be done. Your mission is to drive away the Saxons from your land and keep your family safe at all cost, but that seems to be harder than expected…
Cross of the Dutchman’s story is pretty interesting overall, but it seems to lack a lot of depth. It’s simply people invading your town and you defending your farm, there’s not much more to it. Some adventures together with your family as “side quests” would be fun, and optional quests like helping people around town would’ve also been nice.
Graphics
Graphics wise, Cross of the Dutchman simply looks and feels cool. It has a cartoon-like graphic style and it fits perfectly with the casual nature of the game. The little cutscenes the game shows you now and then also look really nice, they resemble more of a drawing than an actual cutscene, which is pretty neat. The environment and characters are also surprisingly detailed and look nice as well.
When looking at performance, it’s pretty clear that Cross of the Dutchman doesn’t need the best of PC’s to run. It should run quite good on a system that’s three to four years old, even then you can still try to tweak the settings a little bit to get the best experience possible.
Sound
Music and sound effects is something that Cross of the Dutchman does extremely well. The game is filled with great music and it makes the experience much more enjoyable, especially when you’re fighting big battles. Sound effects are also pretty nice, they’re not really disturbing in any way and accompany the game quite well.
Gameplay
First of all, Cross of the Dutchman is an action adventure game with some dungeon crawler elements. The game is fully controlled with just your mouse (or controller) and is very easy to play. You simply click or hold where you want to run, left click or hold on enemies to attack and right click for your special attack. Everything is really simple except that you might find yourself clicking next to enemies a lot of the time while fighting them, which is a little bit annoying. Pier also has a bit of a turn radius, but he’s a big guy, so maybe that’s intentional?
Of course, even though Pier is a big guy, he has a health bar. Obviously, your health decreases when you’re attacked and it will regenerate over time when out of combat, no potions needed! You also have a stamina bar which is used for special attacks. There’s different special attacks you can get and some will drain more stamina than others, this resource is also regenerated over time, even when in combat.
New special attacks can be bought in shops for gold, other things you can buy are health and stamina upgrades but they’re rather limited. Of course you’ll need a way to collect gold in order to become a tough fighter. You can kill enemies, break destructible objects or find treasure chests scattered across the chapters.
The game itself features eight chapters in total, but they’re not that big at all. You can finish the game in about three hours, which will probably get you 80-90% of the achievements as well. Most of the time, you’ll just be running from one town to another to kill Saxons, so it’s not like there is a lot of gameplay variety. It’s very linear so maybe it’s for the better that it’s a short game because it might get boring when you’re doing the same thing for hours straight.
However, the game does feature some stealth bits, but they aren’t good at all. Most of the time you’ll just be slaloming around guards with their torches at night hoping they won’t turn around last second and see you. The stealth bits are also quite long without any checkpoints, so getting seen will send you back minutes, resulting in being stuck for 10 minutes at times.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we can say that Cross of the Dutchman is okay, but it’s not okay enough. It looks very nice and the music is amazing, but the gameplay is rather lacking. The only thing you’ll find yourself doing is running across the same town a hundred times, kill a hundred Saxons, kill a hundred more and then fail horribly in the forced stealth bits. Maybe if there were more gameplay elements and more variety altogether, the game would be that much better.
Cross of the Dutchman - Review,
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