Developer: Vested Interest/Loose Cannon Productions, Inc.
Publisher: Electronic Arts/Origin Systems
Reviewed by Cat91 on 1/18/02

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First Impressions:

No one really seems to know where Crusader designer Tony Zurovec has gone. In 1997, shortly after the release of No Regret (the second and final installment in the Crusader series), Zurovec left EA/Origin. He then formed his own production company, Digital Anvil, Inc. DA aligned itself with Microsoft for game development, and that's about the last we've heard of Mr. Zurovec. As for Crusader, Origin still owns it. A third title was in development as recently as 1999, but was killed so the company could devote 100% of its resources to its Ultima Online franchise. That's too bad: Crusader was, and still is, awesome. Let's open the creaky, cobwebby door and peek inside this treasure from the past.

Graphics:

One would think that a game restricted to approximately 320x200 resolution and 256 colors SVGA would be one ugly game, especially in these days of GeForce 3 and DirectX 8.1-driven, hardware accelerated, lifelike visual effects, but Crusader works even now. Its graphics are largely sprite-driven; backgrounds are art-based. Thousands of frames of painstaking animation are evident here: in the player character and AI units, a monomaniacal attention to detail by programmers Mark Vittek and company is clear. In a time long before dynamic lighting and 3D acceleration (Monster I 3Dfx daughterboards were just beginning to hit the market in '95), a soldier, wearing shiny plastic armor, holding a blazing cannon, has light from the muzzle-flash reflected on his chest. Explosions are bright and crisp. Everything the player sees, including railings, desks, tables, chairs, computers, and terminals, can be blown up. In No Remorse, almost every weapon the Silencer, the man-in-red who is the central character, holds is different from every other and clearly visible in his grasp.

The animation includes a pistol draw that they must have modeled from the real thing: the Silencer smoothly draws his PA-21 laser, or BA-41 machine pistol from a holster on his right thigh, and coolly steps back into a perfect Weaver-style shooting stance! Rifles, grenade launchers, and shotguns are drawn over-the-shoulder, like a Roman legionnaire drawing a sword. The SG-1A pump-action shotgun is the most fun: the Silencer racks it like a small-town sheriff after each shot. Origin told people to "explore their attitude" with the release of No Regret in '97, and this is why. Every weapon kills differently: there are approximately a dozen different death animations.

Alarm terminals light up red; enemy soldier types each have their own death sequence; each has just enough gore that players get the idea without being grossed out. There are also many interactive devices: some start video clips that, sadly, have low resolution but suck you relentlessly into the storyline. Even after six years, Crusader is better in the graphics department than later games like Myth. If they did it in 3D back then, using an engine similar to the Nocturne series that came years later, one can only guess how incredible a new Crusader could be.

Sound/Music:

Do you ever get tired of hearing your grandparents say "they sure don't make 'em like they used to?" Well, in the sound department particularly, that's the case with Crusader: no one does it like this anymore. The musical score is, bar none, the best I have ever heard before or since. It's a sort of techno funky dance jam, with about four different tunes. There is a cheat that allows one to change the track playing from the ones present, but I'd recommend leaving it for the computer to manage. It appears that the designers set a certain type of mood music to play in the background for your adventures, and it really fits what's going on without becoming intrusive and giving the game away, like the aforementioned Nocturne did.

The video clips are done by actors, and all of the parts are well-acted, by people who obviously enjoyed the roles they played. The sound tends to be a little glitchy on these, but I've played the game on systems ranging from a Pentium 90 with Packard Bell onboard sound to a PIII 500 running a SoundBlaster Live!Value; with more powerful systems, the video clips run better.

Death screams are varied: upon seeing the Silencer, enemy soldiers yell predictable and fun lines like "Security! Halt!" and "Intruder sighted!" When you meet special forces soldiers later in the game (in the story line, the player is a defector from the special forces), they taunt you with "Die, sucker!" and "Take that, traitor!" All of it is very well done.

Gameplay:

Crusader is set in the distant future, where a group called the World Economic Consortium, or WEC, has taken over the entire world. You are a Silencer, an elite member of the WEC special forces. The leader of the WEC is a brutal figure known as Chairman Draygan, and under his iron thumb the people are suffering. Your three-man team is targeted for assassination after allowing suspected rebels (women and children), to flee unmolested. You are attacked by a Vetron, a servomech of great power. Your friends are slain. You survive. You're out for revenge, so you throw in with General Maxis and his Resistance band, and are then given the rank of Captain in the Resistance. No one trusts you: they all think you're a WEC spy. No Silencer has ever defected. You're a symbol of all they hate, but you're all they have.

The player's mission is to infiltrate WEC bases on secret ops, controlled by your Resistance cell. Your leader is Colonel Stephen Ely, a burly, cigar-smoking African-American who can't understand why General Maxis trusts you, but follows orders. Ely uses you on simple missions at first, then harder ones as you gain his trust. He's the second one to come around: the first is your Insertion Reconnaissance expert, Andrews. Known as "Taxman" from his days in the Revenue Assessment Division, he understands why the others distrust you and befriends you from the start. Corporal Troy Reeves, or "Wizard," is your extraction specialist. He calls you "Tin Man" because of your bright red combat armor, and comes to respect you as you carry out your missions. Then there's Corporal Cardova and Sgt. Brooks. Cardova (known as "Yo-Yo"), hates you with a passion. So does Shannon Brooks, who watched Silencers kill her family at the city of Petra. Can you bring them around? There's also Major Joanne Vargas, who is Ely's aide. She likes you; you rescue her from the evil Dr. Gregor Hoffman's vivisection lab in your second mission. Finally, there's the smuggler, Weasel, from whom you buy black market weapons with credits you take from the bodies of those you kill during a mission.

As you can see, there's hours of game play here. I find that Crusader is like a good book that you come back to again and again, to reread and enjoy the developing storyline and character interactions even though you know how it inevitably ends. I have never seen a story as well developed, and characters as well done, in a shooter. Only Bungie's Oni comes close.

Movement of the Silencer is done by keyboard. Simple controls allow you to walk in any direction, roll left or right, advance, retreat, crouch, jump, or run. It's intuitive after awhile. When th character has his gun out, a red crosshair helps target, and a bright orange reticle targets what he's aiming at, if it's a priority target he needs to shoot right away. This is a third person isometric shooter, meaning that the game grid is in three-quarter cutaway, offset so you are looking sort of down from the roof at the Silencer. You cannot move the game grid around like in a true 3D game. This causes trouble when the character is at the bottom of the play area, hidden by a wall or object in game. Most objects are interactive and can be manipulated or destroyed. Dead bodies are persistent, and you can tell where you've been by the carnage you have wrought. The first time I played this game, my husband used a butchered line from the movie The Outlaw Josey Wales to describe it: "Not a hard woman to track: leaves dead men wherever she goes!"

Crusader has the four best villains I've seen in a computer game. The evil Dr. Gregor Hoffman is a staple in our family now: his death scene is the best example of an egomaniac's death ever. Draygan drips evil, and his henchwoman (I'll not name her-you guess who she is) is thoroughly bad, but you'd never know it until the end. Senator Snell of the WEC Congress is a sniveling coward who you get a shot at kidnapping in one mission, and you deal with a Resistance deep cover agent who is a scared scientist that wants to be anywhere else. The story is full of finely-wrought suspense as you investigate the possibility of a double agent in the Resistance, along with doing missions to advance the Resistance's good works and foil Draygan's evil plots. Back at the Resistance base, you can switch on the television and see the WEC news media twist your exploits into terrorist acts.

Enjoyment:

We have an old computer in the house solely to play Crusader. My husband and I play it together: he looks over my shoulder and helps me find traps and clues. The game is so complex that even six years later we are still finding Easter eggs and parts of levels I never knew existed. I'm only now getting good enough that I can play the game at its higher levels; that in itself has opened up a vista of Crusader gameplay I didn't know existed, either. We're trying to find backup copies on online auction sites: the game is out of print, and I'd just hate it if the CDs were damaged so that I couldn't play any more. As I said, Crusader is like a good book that you read over and over again. What other game has done that?

Multiplayer:

Nonexistent. This was one of the things about the series that most critics panned. Look right: one of the screenshots has four Silencers in it - one red, one green, one gold, and one black. That's a development shot from Crusader: No Mercy, which was projected as the third installment in the series. It was intended to add multiplayer to another chapter in the rich Crusader single-player storyline. C:NM died in 1999, when Origin made a corporate decision to abandon Crusader and Wing Commander (another highly popular line of story-based games), and concentrate solely on its (eeeww) Ultima Online franchise (I hate UO - does it show?). At the same time, Origin refuses to allow other parties to develop either line of product, and thus Crusader, as well as Wing Commander, are dead and we'll not soon see their like again.

Overall Impression:

Where Crusader falls short is in the fact that you've got to be a computer geek to configure it. If my hubby wasn't a network systems engineer I'd never have played the game. It was one of the last DOS-only games, and must be carefully configured for your system during the install program. Forget playing it with any OS higher than Windows 98: you have to have actual DOS to run it, so true 32-bit operating systems are out. It will not run under Windows 2000, Me, or XP. Further, pathing for the AI units is off: you see them marching back and forth, trying to find a clear path to approach you, when rooms are tightly packed with objects. However, their AI is really pretty good: they listen for you, and respond more often than not when they hear shots. Civilians trip alarms and yell "You're not authorized! What are YOU doing here?" and "Oh, NO!" when they see you.

Crusader blew it with women in only one area: the fact that the Silencer can't be configured female. The red suit is pretty obviously male, however, use your imagination and you can get past that. Also, two of the major characters are women; both are well characterized and not overacted. For 1995, Crusader did a pretty good job representing women.

Despite its flaws, Crusader withstands the test of time. Of all the games I own, sims included, this and its sibling, No Regret, are the only titles that have survived for so long.

Marketing Efforts Towards Women:

In 1995? Please. Even with this, I have to note that the two women in the game, Major Vargas and Sgt. Brooks, are well-developed, strong, confident, and not at all one-dimensional. Further, they are not even close to the sort of pseudo-wet dream fluff that has become much the industry standard for in-game portrayals of women these days. Crusader harks back to a time when the computer gaming age was still new, and hadn't yet been solely aimed at adolescent boys and men who never grew up. In many ways, Crusader has an intellectual appeal, with elements of mystery and skullduggery that even now make it feel like a futuristic James Bond movie. If they'd given us the opportunity to make the Silencer female, it'd be golden as far as I'm concerned. Game producers today need to look back at the past: back then, they did have some things right, and no one's come close to Crusader since it was released.

Additional links:

Crusader: No Remorse walkthrough at GameFAQs