It’s getting to the time of year when every week there seems to be a big hitter out which makes it an expensive time to be a gamer, this week is no different. ‘Rage’ came out on Friday and is set to do very well indeed. The eagle eyed among you may have noticed that the title of this had no hint of ‘Rage’ in it whatsoever, that’s because I will not be mentioning it again from… now. ‘The Cursed Crusade’ also came out on Friday and despite it not necessarily being something I’d go for I decided to give it a punt, and you know what? It’s actually pretty good.
‘The Cursed Crusade’ is the story of Denz De Bayle, Templar knight on a quest to cleanse his soul of the Templar’s Curse which he has inherited from his father. In order to do this you must hack ‘n slash your way through some 30 levels of gradually increasing difficulty. You are assisted by the AI companion Esteban Noviembre, a Spanish bandit also afflicted with the curse who by a twist of fate you are intertwined with from the very beginning.
As a hack ‘n slash the game consists almost entirely of rooms connected by corridors with enemies to batter along the way, this being the case the combat system is pretty much the be all and end all of the game. Luckily ‘The Cursed Crusade’ doesn’t disappoint in this area. Your moves depend on what weapons you happen to be holding at any given time, you can pick up weapons from downed enemies and can carry one two handed weapon, one shield, two one handed weapons and one ranged weapon at a time. You can wield these weapons in a decent number of combinations and each has different brutal finishing moves you can perform. As you finish levels you gain Victory Points, these points are used to learn new moves for the weapon combinations you’ve unlocked and one point per level is used to increase one of your core skills: Strength, Weapon Mastery, Armour Mastery, Constitution and Curse Mastery. Strength and Constitution boost damage and health, Weapon Mastery increases weapon proficiency and lets you do finishing moves more often, Armour Mastery adds extra bits of armour the enemy has to get through before they hit your health bar and Curse Mastery makes you able to stay longer in Curse.
Curse is the game’s stand out point which differentiates itself from between the other myriad games of the same genre. Curse is activated by hitting LB (in the case of Xbox 360) and changes the area to a fiery hell on earth type place; you grow horns and get several new abilities as well as being stronger and faster. Here’s where Curse mode gets interesting, as you kill enemies the Curse gauge fills in tiers, tier 1 auto refills and from that point on it increases as you kill enemies or take damage. Whilst you are in Curse mode the gauge depletes but you have to keep to an eye on it because if it runs dry and you haven’t cancelled it your health drains to maintain the Curse: and it drains really, really fast. I spent a good portion of the game only using it very sparingly in combat but in the later levels I found it was becoming more necessary to use it and in one of the last ones became very hard indeed when I did run out of Curse, didn’t notice and was very quickly playing most of the level on 1/3 health.
I made sure to say that I used Curse sparingly in combat because there are other things to use it for. In most levels there are souls to purify and a bloody crucifix to find and destroy and both of these can only be seen in Curse. Finding them is definitely worthwhile since they give you bonus victory points as well as trophies or achievements. Curse also lets you break weakened walls to access new areas and progress through the levels.
So good combat, good amount of game time (8-10 hours easy) and a nice system that sets it apart from the competition, what’s the bad side of this game? Well there are definitely a few minor niggles here and there that stop this from being a great game and cement in firmly in the good category. First, for all the good things Curse mode does for the game the changes in the environment make certain things difficult to see, including a good number of the crucifixes that can only be seen in Curse mode. The lock on system the game employs is sometimes irritating, forcing you in one direction when you would be better off alternating between targets and the general camera controls can sometimes seem jumpy, in certain areas moving the camera slows the game to almost flick book pace. There were a couple of instances where an animation didn’t work properly but there was no problem in game, just a bit annoying. Dying in a level means you have to start all over again, the levels aren’t that long and at least on the lower difficulties you won’t die often but checkpoints are your friends! Finally in terms of negatives there was a sound issue where every time I turned the game on the sound levels were all turned to 0, which was weird and annoying.
All in all ‘The Cursed Crusade’ was an enjoyable game. The good combat outweighs the minor points that bring it down and make the game worth a play if you want something not so mainstream to keep you going until the next big release you are no doubt waiting for. Hack ‘n slash isn’t a genre I usually dabble in so the fact that I enjoyed and played it all the way through to the end is testament to it’s good quality. Like I said at earlier it’s not great but I wasn’t expecting it to set the world on fire, it’s good fun and well worth giving a second glance to, as most people will see it then ignore it completely and buy that particular weeks big gun. That said I shall now start said big gun ‘Rage’ which I bought at the same time because I’m weak when it comes to post-apocalyptic romps, wait… does that count as mentioning it… damn it.
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