Origin's company slogan is "We Create Worlds" and they've earned it with classic games such as Wing Commander and Ultima. Now they've created another world in the newly released Crusader, and it's one of their best. It's an action shooter from an isometric 3-D view, but it goes beyond being just a shooter. There's a good bit of strategy, problem solving, and cinematic animations thrown in to give it the feel of something larger than just a game. This is what their slogan "We Create Worlds" is all about, and Crusader is a prime example of that goal.
The world of Crusader takes place about 100 years in the future where, of course, everything has gone rotten. Instead of a democratic government, an institution called the World Economic Consortium is in charge of everything on a global scale. Basically, the WEC is a cross between government and a huge corporation. The goals in this society are to produce and manufacture products as efficiently as possible, and any criticism of the WEC is, to put it mildly, frowned upon. People who don't believe in these ideals are usually thrown into jail or executed. There is a fairly strong group of militants trying to win back capitalism, the free market, and the pursuit of happiness who call themselves the Resistance. Using terrorist and guerrilla tactics, the members of the Resistance live to make the WEC as miserable as possible.
Since the WEC is the government, they also run the military and have access to all of the weaponry and soldiers in it. The roughest, toughest guys in the military are called Silencers. They walk around in red plastic armored plates and carry the biggest, baddest weapons around. They're the Rambos of the future. You, the player, are one of these Silencers who was involved in a mission where the orders involved civilians and killing. You got fed up and defected over to the Resistance. Since Silencers are hand-picked for loyalty and trained to stay that way, everyone at the Resistance is appropriately suspicious of your intentions. The game picks up as you begin your first mission to prove yourself.
The game is played from an isometric view very much like what was found in Syndicate. But unlike Syndicate, the screen doesn't scroll as the player moves. Instead, when the player walks to a side of the screen, the game will automatically reposition the screen to show the next part of the level. I would have liked to have had a scrolling environment, but after playing it a while I find that this system really works well. The player can center the screen on their character at any time so you don't have to wait for the computer to switch views. Also, if something is off the screen but theoretically is still in view (you're at one end of a room and a bad guy is at the other end which is just off screen) the game treats whatever is off the screen as out of view. This way you aren't getting shot by someone you can't even see, which keeps the computer from having an unfair advantage.
The controls and movement of your Silencer really give this game a great depth of play. You can walk forward and backwards, turn left and right, jump, crouch, run and roll to the sides. When I first saw the control system for all of these moves I just about put the game back in the box and forgot about it, but the designers knew just what they were doing. In about five minutes, I was moving through rooms and avoiding fire like a regular war hero. The arrow keys are used for moving forward and rotating, but combined with the control key the Silencer jumps, crouches and rolls, while the arrows used with the alt key makes you advance with the weapon drawn, or sidestep. Shift makes everything happen quickly and the space bar fires. Do these keys sound familiar? That's right, they're using the same keys used in Doom and every other clone since. Being a Doom player (and what gamer isn't), I found this key configuration very easy to get used to, even though the fire button is different.
The graphics are absolutely first-rate. As I touched on before, the look is very much like Syndicate except it's much closer in, and the action is so well done I was sucked into the game. The Silencer wears plastic armor and that comes across very well in the graphics - it looks like he's wearing plastic. And watch out for those explosions, probably the most impressive I've seen in any game, period. And my favorite, if not the most disturbing, feature of the game is when you or an enemy soldier happens to get zapped in an explosion or hit with an exploding shell. The person catches on fire and stumbles around the room screaming in a horrible, pathetic way, eventually collapsing to the floor and burning away to ashes. Some will find it incredibly funny, some will find it disquieting, but I've played no other game that has even come close to bothering me like watching and listening to those guys on fire. There is an option for the more squeamish which turns off the extremely violent features, but I eventually got over it and started looking for someone to hit with my rocket launcher.
Perhaps the biggest selling point on the game play of Crusader is the interactive environment. Virtually anything that you see on the screen can be blown up or interacted with. Electrical boxes on the wall turn things on and off, glass shatters, guard rails get decimated, chairs go careening across the room when shot, and those barrels of toxic whatever go up in flames better than anything else in the game. When you walk too close to electrical equipment, electricity reaches out and shocks you. The environment is very alive and interesting, with things reacting just as you'd expect them to in real life.
An actual mission begins with you teleporting in on a teleport pad somewhere in the area of operations. You have a vague idea of what to do by pre-mission briefings, which are in full video, and you also have a computer data-link which outlines your objectives. But you basically follow the levels, which are laid out in such a way that if you just keep going forward you'll eventually get where you want to go. The manual says that there's more than one way to accomplish things, and that's true to a certain point. As far as the manner and sequence you kill some bad guys, there are different ways of doing it. But the path you take to the final goal, the traps you avoid, the switches you throw - those are all pretty much the same each time. Some levels have loops which you can go through either way, and some rooms don't have to be visited at all, but the basic level design doesn't change. This means that there isn't a high degree of replayability in this game.
While traveling through a level you have to keep a constant eye on your health meter and your shield. Your shield protects from certain weapons, mostly bullets, while your health is affected by anything that touches you, including explosions, lasers and bullets. When either of these levels drops too low there are booths scattered around that you can step into for a quick refill. There are other goodies which help you on your way like medi-packs and spider bombs, which you can get from lockers or lift off any dead personnel you encounter along the way. Also, when you reach certain points in the mission, you'll interact with certain characters, both good and bad. When this happens, video pops up on your screen while the person does their little speech.
The levels don't consist of you just shooting and moving, there are puzzles and traps all through the games. Those power boxes on the wall have to be thrown in order to activate or deactivate fields or move elevators, there are hidden floor panels that have to be stepped on to perform certain tasks, and key cards are placed around each level that you have to find to get through locked doors. If you don't have a key, you can always blast your way through unless there's a force field around the door.
After each mission you return to the rebel base where you can interact with all of your rebel comrades. Visiting your commanding officer gets you mission debriefings and information on the upcoming job, or you can go to the bar where most of all the other rebel members hang out. Each of them can be "talked" to - talking consists of clicking on them and watching videos. Even though it's all a one-way conversation, the video quality is fairly high. The video suffers in full-screen mode, but the actors do a decent job, lending believability and fun to the game. The one character that you'll interact with is Weasel. This is the guy who sells guns and ammo to you, which you buy with credits you lifted off your victims. All in all there are 16 different weapons you can use throughout the game, but not all of them will be available to you at the beginning.
Even though there's not much replayability in Crusader there are lots of big levels which take time and dedication to get through, 15 missions total. I'd say the minimum time for an average mission is an hour, depending on which difficulty level you play on. As the missions progress expect to be taking more and more time on each level. Fortunately, the missions never end up becoming boring because you have different styles of terrain and equipment to deal with. Refineries, labs, military bases and even a space station are all included in Crusader.
Origin has really done one super job with Crusader. None of the ideas in this game are especially original, but the implementation is superb. The graphics are crisp and the animation of all the soldiers, including your character, is as good as you'll find. If you find anything you don't like about Crusader it'll be a matter of taste because I simply couldn't find any design flaws in this game. However, before you buy this game, be forewarned: Crusader takes a pretty good machine to run properly. My P60 with 8 megs of RAM ran it with little trouble, but when a lot of action started happening all at once, there were good-sized pauses while my system dealt with all of the memory requirements. I'd say that if you want to run Crusader with all of the goodies and no pauses, use at least a P75 with 16 megs of RAM. But a lesser machine won't keep you from enjoying Crusader because there are options you can toggle on and off which customize the game to your specs. Regardless of all the technical stuff, if you're an action fan, you owe it to yourself to get Crusader. These are the kinds of games that make upgrading your machine worth it. Crusader is the most action fun I've had in a while, and it shows that an action game in the 90s doesn't have to be in first-person to be fun.
