The Cursed Crusade

A solid adventure despite some significant issues, The Cursed Crusade is well worth a look this holiday.

The curse of this crusade is hurry, which can be seen in almost every aspect of the game. The historical premise is interesting and the fundamentals of the fighting system are in order, but there is no finishing touch. Glitches, frustrating level design, dumb AI and screwed up damage modelling are sure signs of unnecessary haste. With proper finishing this crusade would have triumphed. [Nov 2011]

Too technically deficient to get a high score, but the over-the-top voiceovers, evolving combat and ripping yarn make this worth a look anyway. [Dec 2011, p.111]

It has lost a good opportunity to become one of the surprises of the year because it has good ideas in its proposal, between a movie and a game. The story is typical, but able to engage us, but its gameplay is too lackluster and repetitive.

At best, The Cursed Crusade is mediocre. The plot is bland, but the cut scenes try to shove the story down your throat at every opportunity, causing an adverse reaction

The Cursed Crusade is a mediocre hack-and-slash with serious technical and playable issues.

Not the worst game ever made, just doing a very good job of mimicking it on first impressions. [Issue#211, p.96]

Ultimately, The Cursed Crusade suffers from something far worse than the characters within – the curse of boredom. By the end, I no longer cared about whether or not Denz finds his father, or if he and Estaban managed to break the curse, and only cared that I could turn the game off.

It's too bad, because Cursed Crusade has fleetingly interesting ideas, like forcing you to push a very slow-moving mantlet towards an enemy's defensive line, or the way the timing of tapping out combo strings actually encourages thoughtful player response. Co-op can actually be fun in short bursts with a friend, and even the detailed aesthetic is surprisingly competent.

The Cursed Crusade certainly had potential, and if Kylotonn spent more time on the flow and diversity of combat a number of the smaller issues such as the lack of a checkpoint system or stiff ranged gameplay could easily have been overlooked. However the studio decided to add variety through other means, unknowingly underpinning the rest of the game.

The Cursed Crusade is a perfect example of the sort of game that's being squeezed out nowadays: badly produced, cheaply made and full of tired clichés, both in gameplay and in its story.

It's just a waste of time. Too clumsy to satisfy any action gaming urge, and too wrapped up in its own turgid mythology to realise it's getting things so badly wrong, releasing it right before the onslaught of massive winter releases is a decision more audacious than any design choices in the game itself.

Even for a budget title the combat system is nothing short of a clunky mess, with slow animations and unsatisfying combos. [Holiday 2011, p.83]

The sheer realism of the combat might make you fall a little bit in love at first, but as enemies never seem to die, and the controls never seem to respond well to what you do, you quickly lose interest.

The Cursed Crusade is a repetitive hack-and-slash that is marred by clumsy combat, poor dialogue, and some serious technical issues.