YMMV / Crimsonland

• Anti-Climax Boss: The last level of Chapter Seven, Final Showdown is this compared to the last level of the Chapter Six, The Gathering. While The Gathering is basically taking every single Demonic Spider in the game from Asteroids Monsters to Bullet Hell projectile spewing enemies to Mook Makers that will fill the screen with bad guys to projectile spewing enemies that only stop shooting to become invincible instead and sicking them on you to the point where just getting a weapon and your first level is an accomplishment, Final Showdown is limited to all melee enemies and none of them are especially hard to kill, making it easy to collect both powers and levels.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • A lot of the high scoring players have some kind of shotgun as their favorite weapon. While you can't choose the weapons you get unless you get the "Random Weapon" perk, it does speak to how popular the shotguns are among players.
  • The Mean Minigun and Pulse Gun are common picks for favorite weapons among Weapon Picker players, since all weapons you get in that mode have only one clip, and those two have exceptionally large clips.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The red and white Asteroids Monster type of spider, known as the Spideroids. Every time you kill one, they split into two smaller spiders that continue pursuing you without even slowing down.
  • The small red zombies may be fragile, but they're surprisingly nimble and maneuverable, sometimes weaving out of the way of your shots. It's also easy to lose track of them once the ground is soaked with blood.
  • Any enemy that fires projectiles, since the ability to use ranged attacks is one of your main tactical advantages over the hordes of enemies you fight.
  • One spider encountered late in the Quest mode, and after surviving a long time in Survival mode alternates between shooting powerful plasma projectiles and using a shield that makes itself immune to damage.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Infernal Contract reduces your health by 99%, but gives you three perks, one of which can be used to heal you or regenerate your health if you get lucky enough to be offered them. You can also choose perks that would also reduce your health, such as Thick Skinned or Breathing Room, without suffering any further penalties.
  • Grim Deal kills you, but increases your score by 66%. If you take that when you have an extremely high score, and are about to die anyway, your score will skyrocket.
  • The Mean Minigun in Weapon Picker. Since all weapons come with only a single clip of ammo, the long reload time, one drawback that renders it Awesome, but Impractical in normal play, is a non-issue, and the large clip size means that you'll be able to use the gun for a long time. Combine that with the fact that powerups often result in the clip being refilled, and you'll see why many of the high scorers use the Mean Minigun as their favorite weapon.
  • Poison Bullets poison any monster they hit. They make quick work of Spideroids, since if the spiders are poisoned when they split, their offspring will also start off poisoned, and will likely split/die immediately. The Splitter Gun also makes it quite easy to poison large groups of monsters, due to the bullets splitting after each hit and hitting other monsters.
  • Telekinesis allows you to pick up powerups by pointing your mouse at them. Combine this with perks that increase the drop rate for items and Bonus Economist(which makes powerups last longer) and Man Bomb (collecting powerups causes an explosion on your character), and much of the game will be a breeze.
  • The Radioactive Perk in the Spideroids mission completely trivializes an otherwise-That One Level, even on Grim difficulty. If you're lucky enough to obtain it by killing a few of the max-sized spiders to level up, you can keep your distance close to the spiders (max-size and first split spiders are still slower than you). This not only deals constant damage to them if they're near you, but they also don't split when killed by the radiation, negating the biggest threat they pose.
• Goddamned Bats: Some monsters have shields that protect against gunfire and freezing, although, mercifully, they don't attack while shielded.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The flamethrower family of weapons, especially the Blowtorch. They have short range and the damage isn't nearly enough to make up for it. In fact, if you're running forward, the range technically gets even shorter, since how far a flame travels is dependent on where you were standing when you pulled the trigger, meaning it's technically possible to outrun your own flames. The Blowtorch is especially bad, since you have to practically stand next to the monsters. The Pyromaniac Perk and the weapon upgrade powerup can offset the downsides, but in many cases, especially the early game, even the pistol is more useful.
  • Gauss weapons. Most of them have poor clip size and slow rate of fire compared to similar weapons. They do fairly good damage and can pierce through enemies, but the latter benefit becomes useless against enemies that don't die in one hit.
• That One Achievement:
  • Booom, which requires getting over 75,000 points in Nukefism mode, in which you can only damage monsters by collecting powerups. How well you do largely depends on which powerups you get, especially the Speed (which lets you avoid the monsters and collect other powerups more easily), as well as whether the Shock Chains hit clumps of monsters, so this is largely a Luck-Based Mission.
  • Smart Packrat, which requires you to collect the Blowtorch weapon 50 times. Even disregarding how the Blowtorch is the game's Joke Weapon, collecting it 50 times will take quite a while, since it randomly spawns.
  • Perky. Most of the Perks are collected fairly easily by completing the Quest mode on Normal, which is not a difficult achievement. However, the last Perk, Lifeline, is only obtained by getting a high score in the puzzle game Gembine. Not only is accessing Gembine a Guide Dang It! (input a code during the credits), but getting the high score can be difficult for those who aren't good at puzzles.
• That One Level:
  • Surprisingly, Chapter 1, Level 1: Welcome to Crimsonland, becomes this on higher difficulties. The game starts you off against large yellow spiders that shoot plasma cannon bullets, while still only starting you with a pistol. This level is much harder than many of the subsequent missions, making it an overly brutal case of Wake-Up Call Boss.
  • Chapter 2, Level 10: Spideroids. This level introduces the spiders that split when they're defeated, and they're the only type of enemy you face. By the time the spiders start dying for good, you'll probably have dozens, if not hundreds, on screen at once.
  • Chapter 6, Level 10: The Gathering. There's lots of spiders, from the ones that split to the small green ones that shoot projectiles. As mentioned under Anti-Climax Boss, this is harder than the actual final level.