Review by Enigma

Polish up your chain mail. Sharpen your sword and your wits. We're going to battle our way through sieges, espionage, assassinations, imprisonment, plots and betrayal in the Year of Our Lord 1183. Along the way, watch out! You won't be able to avoid learning something interesting about entirely unchivalrous medieval knights and the snake pit of power-hungry rulers in the Holy Land. It's going to be a journey into the past and into your own mind. In this historical "edutainment" game, they got the history right, and it will shock you out of any romantic visions you may have had about the Middle Ages.

This second in the trilogy of historical games produced by the French company Index+ uses the same kind of gameplay as Vikings and Genesys, but with an even more complex storyline and puzzles. This one's going to take some time to finish, because many of the "riddles," while they look easy, aren't.

The Story

We begin in 1180. The introduction to our hero, Sir Arthaud, owner of a small-time fiefdom in France, reveals him as something less than your ideal chivalrous knight. He's an illiterate, money-hungry brute, just like most medieval knights and lords. The little monastery in his fiefdom hasn't paid him the full amount of tribute he's demanded, so he attacks and destroys it. That kind of behavior, really, was typical of his historical counterparts. They were violence-crazed barbarians, and what they wanted they took from anyone, including monks, peasants, and other nobles.

Arthaud's behavior shocks King Phillippe Auguste of France (if you've seen the great film The Lion in Winter, you've met Phillippe as played by a young Timothy Dalton). In the opening sequence of Crusader, Phillippe attacks Arthaud's little castle and imprisons him for three years in a small stone chamber. When Arthaud emerges, Phillippe gives him a mission: travel to Jerusalem, steal the relics of the True Cross, and bring them back to France. If Arthaud succeeds within one year, Phillippe will give him his fiefdom back.

It's a tall order but Arthaud has little choice. On the perilous voyage to the Holy Land Arthaud meets a stowaway, a mysterious, learned Muslim named Al Harawi who serves as the game's narrator. Once in St. Jean d'Acre on the shores of the Holy Land, Arthaud grabs his ship's valuable cargo and sells it to one Reynald de Chatillon, a powerful lord. Reynald has hatched a devious plot to gain control of the entire Holy Land. In fact, Reynald might even be involved with the conspirators who plan to seize the throne of Jerusalem by murdering Little Baldwin, the five-year-old heir to Baldwin IV, Jerusalem's tragic "Leper King."

Will Arthaud succeed in his mission? Will he get rich? Will he save Little Baldwin and find salvation in spite of himself? That's where you come in.

Gameplay

Crusader, like Vikings and Genesys, features "riddles" that organize the gameplay, interspersed with well-produced cutscenes that advance the plot. You must find objects and characters to place on the "riddle screens" in order to build a chapel, for example, or fire a trebuchet and catapult. Unlike Vikings, however, in Crusader you'll find these objects and characters not only on the playing screens but also in the encyclopedia. It isn't necessary to visit the entire encyclopedia, but the game forces the player to visit and read a great deal of it to find clues, along with those objects and characters. That greatly expanded search area increases the difficulty of the game. It's often pretty tough to find the last object you need for a riddle, or even to identify what the thing might be. Frustration occurs at about the same level of most well-designed adventure games.

The encyclopedia covers a surprisingly large range of subjects. In it you'll learn something not only about the Crusaders, but also about Islam, Judaism, Christianity as practiced at the time, and the European and Muslim worlds during the Middle Ages. You'll learn something about how to make Greek Fire, a napalm-like substance used in warfare, how to fight a sea battle and how to withstand a siege. You'll delve into the tangled plots and schemes of those vying to seize the Christian holdings in the Holy Land. You can go to the encyclopedia at any time except during cutscenes by clicking on a "book" icon or by making a "quickmove" at the bottom of your screen.

Crusader also expands the range of puzzles over those offered in Vikings. This time you'll find several puzzles in which you'll chart a sea route to the Holy Land or an overland route to a fortress (the toughest riddle in the game, I thought). You'll place characters on maps of St. Jean d'Acre and Jerusalem to see which factions controlled different areas of the cities. You'll build fortifications and even play a chess game.

I wasn't too pleased with Crusader's inventory system. The game allows you to collect objects for upcoming riddles as well as for your current one, and you are allowed to collect more than one of the same object. As well as multiple copies of characters, I wound up with two "projectiles." After I'd used one, the other stayed stuck in the inventory until I needed it much later in the game. That made for a sometimes unwieldy system. However, if you can cope with an even more cluttered inventory, you might choose to pick up any and all objects you find in anticipation of later riddles. It will save searching time later on, but you may miss important clues in the encyclopedia.

Crusader saves your game for you automatically each time you quit. That means you have only one save slot. If you want more, you'll have to restart the game under a different name. While that limitation would be a serious problem in most other games, in Crusader it works just fine. The game is completely linear, so you don't really need more than one saved game.

Lights, Camera, Action

In keeping with the high quality of its other games, Index+ spared no effort on Crusader's cutscenes, artwork, and music. The scenery is simply, absolutely gorgeous. Marvelous, colorful sunsets, seascapes, and desert scenes will have you gasping and downloading screenshots to use as wallpaper. The artwork of the city and interior scenes looks authentic and often is equally as lovely as the cutscenes. Haunting, exciting, and always appropriate background music uses instrumental and vocal arrangements, adding much to the gone-back-in-time atmosphere of the game. It's all enchanting, leading to an extremely enjoyable playing experience.

Nicholas Calderbank, as Al Harawi, narrates the English version of the game and does a splendid job of it. His resonant voice holds the player's interest and adds suspense. The plot he narrates has more twists and subtleties than the Zork text-only mazes, so pay attention to those cutscenes or you'll miss something major. I found it possible to repeat the cutscenes by pressing the "return" button.

Arthaud, our dubious hero, never speaks, rendering him a curiously passive character. The other voice actors do credible jobs, with accents appropriate to their characters. As in Vikings, the actors are shot in full-motion video and superimposed onto the playing screens. You can get them to speak by clicking on them, and they'll give you crucial clues. Even in static scenes they move around constantly, lending plenty of realism to the game.

Bugs

Once I fixed my mysteriously corrupted Quicktime file, I had no trouble running Crusader on my iMac with OS 9.2. Very occasionally I would hear a break in the sound, but that happened so seldom it didn't interfere at all with the play.

The Verdict

Occasionally, debates arise over which gamers prefer, Crusader or Vikings. It's just a matter of personal taste, really, because both games easily rate Gold Stars. Crusader offers a much more complex story and gameplay, but the basic concept of the games is almost identical. For an involving plot, fabulous graphics, plenty of intriguing, vexing puzzles, and accurate history, you'll find Crusader goes far beyond most edutainment games. It's a great choice for entertainment and learning, from high school age to elderly adult. And dare I suggest it, you might even find that the real history is more intriguing than those fake wizards and spells so popular in medieval fantasy games.

So, do you want to travel through time to a lost world full of excitement, espionage, mystery, and ghastly diseases? Do you want to fight villains, if you can figure out who the villains are? Then play Crusader, but beware! If you get stuck in a medieval dungeon and your chain mail rusts, don't say I didn't warn you. 

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Index
Publisher: France Telecom Multimedia
Release Date: 1997

Available for:  

Four Fat Chicks Links

Player Feedback

Screenshots

System Requirements

PC:
Pentium 100
16 MB RAM
Thousands of colors
16-bit sound card
4X CD-ROM drive
Windows 3.1 or Windows 95

Macintosh:
Power PC
OS 7.1
256 colors
4X CD-ROM drive

Where to Find It

Playing Games 24.95



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