Crusader: No Regret is Origin's sequel to its immensely popular Crusader:
No Remorse. You play the role of an elite silencer who, having turned his back on the
evil and powerful Consortium, now works for the Resistance. This game picks up where the
last one leaves off, as you are found adrift in space in a rescue pod after blowing up the
Vigilance Platform. And that's too bad for the guys on the Consortium spaceship that picks
you up. Make no mistake, Crusader: No Regret is an improvement on the already
pretty darn good original; it's longer, tougher, and has a plot, to begin with - but it's
also an awful lot like the first game. The same third person perspective, the same
sometimes jerky character movement, the same techno-industrial levels. No problems loading or running the game
on my Pentium 75 with 16 megs of RAM; though Origin claims 486s or machines with less than
16MB of RAM can handle the game, in my experience such machines have a real struggle
keeping up.
The Look:
Crusader: No Regret is a good-looking game, especially if you
like blowing stuff up. Like its predecessor, it lavishes loads of graphic attention on
explosions, and they are truly wicked. You can limit the size of these babies to speed up
play, but it doesn't really seem to make that much difference and is probably a bad
trade-off anyway. On the other hand, the game's graphics are hampered by a unrelenting
sameness. One level looks much like another. The same shipping containers and walls and
floors and consoles show up in different configurations but without much variation. Add to
this the fact that these levels look very similar to the ones in Crusader: No Remorse,
and you've got a serious lack of personality. Beautiful, but what do you talk about?
Gameplay:
Though it's still the same old
shoot-everything-that-moves-and-most-stuff-that-doesn't game, Origin has made some
significant advances in gameplay on the original. First, the game supports joysticks and
gamepads now. That's good news for those who tired of the clumsy and complex keyboard
commands one had to master to play the first Crusader. The bad news is that nothing
has been done to make using the keyboard a less onerous task. This is problematic because
the game is much tougher now. You could get by with awkward controls in the
less-than-challenging Crusader: No Remorse; however, not but not with this monster.
Even at the less difficult settings you will sooner or later run into a situation that
will take many save-and-loads to finally negotiate, even without fumbling around for the
right key combination.
On the other hand, your job is made easier by new
weapons and help from your resistance buddies, who will periodically contact you to warn
of traps ahead or fill you in on where to find health, ammo and weapons. They also keep
you abreast of the plot, mostly through overacted full-motion videos. The new weapons are
brutal - they allow you to freeze, melt and microwave your enemies. This makes for some
interesting visual effects, but be careful - ammo is limited. Save this stuff for crunch
time.
This isn't the most cerebral of games, even for a shooter. Mostly
your job is to - as my son says - "go around shooting everything." Most of the
puzzles can be solved by massed firepower, and apparently everything and everybody is a
legitimate target - not only soldiers, but lab techs, executives, and secretaries. This
can get a tad repetitive and doesn't exactly reward critical thinking.
Documentation for this game is a problem. Following
a distressing trend in general, the manual is very weak. You may be puzzled by just what
many of your weapons do, especially such items as spider mines (which I learned to guide
only late in the game). Make sure you read the help files.
Overall:
If you liked the first Crusader, you'll love this one. It has many of the
same strengths - it's fast-moving, fun, and good-looking. On the other hand, it's pretty
violent, a bit repetitive, and very difficult at the later levels.
--Rick Fehrenbacher |