![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() You will spend tedious stretches of game time just sprinting between areas. That's a good thing, because the paths to and through the five major environments are extraordinarily, inexplicably long. While it isn't especially detailed or complex, Crusaders does accomplish what many other third-person games don't, and that's to achieve a smooth sense of movement. The gameplay engine is more promising than the story. Although the designers have filled some of the areas with the usual RPG cast of townspeople, unfortunately they have little to say and little bearing on the game itself. Drake traverses a dark forest, an elven mine, an ice world, and eventually a stone stronghold as he rescues royalty and recovers lost artifacts, all of which leads up to his final, predictable meeting with Necros himself. The game starts as Drake feels himself drawn to a flying city and its leader Celestia, who signs him up as a crusader and sends him off on a series of several predictable miniquests through equally familiar environments. The Drake you do get to play delivers an occasional wisecrack but develops very little as a character. But as is too often the case in such games, you're left to read about these preambles in the accompanying manual rather than actually seeing (or maybe even feeling) their impact in the game itself. ![]() The hero Drake is supposed to have witnessed the death of his family and town at the hands of the evil lord Necros and his Legion of the Fallen. While it's set in the interesting Might and Magic fantasy world, Crusaders can't actually bring itself to tell much of a story. However, if the game were any longer, you'd start getting really tired of its numerous shortcomings and even more frustrated that its good ingredients are only half-baked. In its 10 to 12 hours of gameplay, you get a glimpse of its basically good intention: to enrich the third-person action genre with some role-playing game conventions such as evolving character stats, spell casting, and questing. It's probably a good thing that 3DO's Crusaders of Might and Magic is so short. ![]()
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