Cross Of The Dutchman, is one of many titles I'm finding in my crawl through the broken jank of junk in my backlog. I can remember installing it, sighing to myself "Ois, what the hell are you doing with your life". As it turns out, it is finding all the good stuff that I, and many of you, passed over when it was first released.

You play the role of real life hero "Pier Gerlofs Donia", or as the text under his name is displayed as: PIER. With shoulders as big as a commoners torso, the strength of several buff men, and the life of a simple farmer who just wants to tend to his fields and take care of his family.

Alas the Evil Saxons are invading nearby villages and being a general nuisance with all the rape and murder an invading force likes to commit. PIER helps out the nearby town hub by punching a few of them then decides to go back home, ignore the invasion, and eat dinner with his wife and kids.

Of course, that just means means the invasion continues and the threat grows. With PIER slowly getting involved with a bunch of elderly veterans to push back the Saxon menace and let the community return to its simple life.

As mentioned, this is not the normal type of looting focused aRPG. The only drops you get are gold coloured coins. You'll not be picking up various yellow/green/blue Saxon armour and weapons. Just coin. Obviously keeping it in your hammerspace pockets.

Instead throughout the game merchants will unlock special attack abilities if you give them coin. Or various potion bottles to augment your stats.

Generally when these unlock it is a sign you should upgrade to fight the larger Saxon masses that are about to invade the next few maps. But if I am honest... You only need a couple of upgrades. The game is on the easier side and only had a few points where things got challenging, with most deaths being down to my own stupidity of overconfidence.

But the stealth missions can go jump. You've just slaughtered your way through a mass of Saxons and then you want to creep past them so they do not hear you? Only for PIER to then decide that all these Saxon scum should be dead Saxon scum. In these cases if he gets caught he puts his hands up and lets the Saxons arrest him so that the level resets. Personally I'd rather hulk smash the bastards.

The screenshots when I first saw them on Steam does not really do the game justice. There's a subtle different feeling to the game when you see it in motion. The type of shading, lighting, and even the way the characters move and strike is really effective.
Using a special move to strike down a giant swarm of bloody Saxons Okay, okay, I'll stop has a great powerful feeling of clocking out a small army in one move. Nothing is unclear on what is good or bad, everything has a distinct silhouette.

Sound wise it is also good on the music and SFX side. No off centre clunks, effective leitmotif changes for what the mood is aiming for to fill in the lack of voice acting.

Basically I can't complain. It is all good and effective stuff. Though please do check out the game in motion, rather than just the screen caps.

This was a wonderful change from an genre badly needing a new spin on how it works. I only put it aside for a break for dinner before continuing I can highly recommend a playthrough, as long as you go in with the expectation that this is not a looter title and is far more focused on story.

Game Acquisition: Bundle Stars (Killer 8)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 20 February 2022
PC Used: Scorptec Master-RTX2070 2019 MK1

OS: Windows Vista
Processor: Core 2 Duo
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 or better
Storage: 1 GB available space
Additional Notes: You will be able to play the game at decent quality settings on most 3 - 4 year old systems with a decent GPU.