If you’re adverse to the heavy reliance on lengthy and abundant cutscenes that games like, say, the Metal Gear Solid or Final Fantasy series lean on, then your retinas might start to bleed when you see the ratio of cinematics to gameplay found in The Cursed Crusade. For every five minutes of gameplay, there’s at least ten of cutscenes, especially in the opening hours. Every time you’re starting to enjoy the interactive elements of the game, you’ll quickly be yanked out for another two long cutscenes, and the jarring stop-and-start rhythm continually kills any momentum the game has.
The comparatively slim amount of gameplay to story would be more forgiveable if that story wasn’t such a generic collection of clichés and flimsy plotting. You assume the role of Denz de Bayle, a noble warrior ready to join the Knights Templar and wade into The Crusades on a quest to rid himself of a demonic curse. Joining him is Esteban Noviembre, a flippant Spaniard archetype who’d rather be chasing women, wine and treasure, but he too is afflicted with the curse, and the duo’s destiny is entwined until they can free themselves of it.
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Relying entirely on clumsy exposition, The Cursed Crusade stretches out its threadbare story to breaking point. When Esteban first sees the nightmarish, fiery visions that’re symptomatic of the curse, he asks Denz for an explanation, who elusively says with a confident smile, “You’ll find out soon enough, my friend.” Then he puzzlingly just refuses to give his new pal vital information for a couple of days, for no other reason than the game needing to pad the plot for a couple of hours. Evidently, the history lesson to be learnt is that Templars were complete dicks just for the hell of it, but regardless, The Cursed Crusade’s barrage of clumsy dialogue and clichés never translates into a worthwhile or engaging story, so the fact that it takes forever and pulls you from actually playing the game at every opportunity never bodes well.
Adding to the narrative issues, The Cursed Crusade is a visual disappointment, too, and almost every moment of the game pokes you in the eyeballs with its distinctly budget-level graphics. The endless parade of cutscenes are a veritable nightmare of screen-tearing, shoddy animation and bargain basement production values; the disjointed lip-synch work often looks like hilariously like a poorly dubbed ’70s kung-fu movie as dialogue continues long after mouths stop moving, while the clinking spark of metal on metal appears in the air several seconds after swords have struck each other and parted ways.
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The visual shoddiness and physics-related glitches are especially unfortunate since the third-person hack-and-slash combat is almost the saving grace of The Cursed Crusade. The basic formula of attacking and defending relies on blocks, counters, guard breaks and parries much like Assassin’s Creed. Layered on top is a varied, robust set of moves and combos to unlock with points amassed after every level. You can switch up your weapon assignment on the fly with the D-pad, choosing from single swords to dual blades or you can wield sword and shield at once.
There’s a reasonably diverse array of weapons, from swords, maces, axes and spears, which all have limited durability and soon break, meaning snagging new blades from fallen foes or switching between set-ups is a necessity. There are also pre-set points in the environment for special kills; knock an enemy near a torch or well and a prompt will pop up to scorch their face off or do your best impression of Gerard Butler in 300 as you boot them into the abyss. You can also make use of a ‘curse mode’, where you’ll hit L1 to switch to a demonic vision of the battlefield which is largely underused, though enemies become slightly weaker and you get a limited fireball attack, with a couple of extras to be found (a few spirit enemies to cleanse with fire for points).
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At first glance it’s a fairly deep, complex fight system that’s often fun and satisfying, but any lasting enjoyment is quashed by the general lack of gameplay variety and overall shoddy workmanship on display. The controls are usually unresponsive, moves rarely feel like they connect properly, attack animations take forever to wrap up and often display the same clunky glitches as the cutscenes (finishing moves are especially underwhelming and awkward, with only a limited array of animations repeated ad nauseum, featuring swords jerkily and bloodlessly clipping through heads and torsos). There’s never the same fluid, brutal satisfaction that came with the swordplay in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and Cursed Crusade’s combat suffers even more since it’s the only real gameplay that it has to offer and features next to no enemy variety.
Save for a few overused moments where you’ll have to push a mobile defense cart, taking cover as arrow swarms sail in before pushing further, or pre-set moments where you’ll whip out a crossbow to take down archers, all the game offers is the basic combat. A xeroxed parade of soldiers attack, you kill them, move on a bit, cutscenes happen, more generic soldiers attack, and so on. It’s enjoyable enough at first, when the game gives you enough time between cinematics to actually engage some enemies, but the repetitive range of limited set-pieces grows tiresome quickly. There’s an online/local co-op mode, where one of you controls Denz and the other Esteban, but it offers nothing in particular over the single player. There’s the rare point in the game where you’ll need to join forces to shift an obstruction in the enviroment, or give the other player a boost, but the addition of co-op is mostly a pointless afterthought.
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At first glance, you might be forgiven for thinking that The Cursed Crusade is a sequel to similarly plotted budget hack-and-slash co-op game The First Templar. But while that game at least compensated for its bargain basement production values with a decent amount of fun gameplay, The Cursed Crusade can’t offer the same. A plodding, shallow plot steals you away from the gameplay at every opportunity to force an endless parade of clunky cutscenes on you, and when you finally do get to play the game, the initial fun quickly evaporates as the gameplay reveals itself to be rather dull, repetitive and shoddily constructed.
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The Cursed Crusade is available to buy on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC now.
Click here to order it from Amazon.co.uk.