History Channel's Crusades: Quest for Power

"You think the pope would consider launching a crusade against Activision Value?"

Sometimes I ask myself why I choose to write game reviews instead of dedicating my time to becoming something important, like a doctor or a professional Lawnmower racer. Games like this remind me why, since seeing as how the last time I made up a fact to sound smart bad video game related suicide was the leading cause of death in [insert whatever country the reader is from], and seeing as how you're reading this review means you've heard of the game and might be thinking about buying it, I just saved your life. Crusades: Quest for power is a game that IS bad enough to kill people.

Honestly, I should have known the game would suck from the "Activision value" on the label, the way the epic crusader on the box looked like an escaped mental patient who was stabbing himself through the head with his plastic sword, and the way it wouldn't install off the autorun menu and I had to manually access the CD and run the setup program. I probably didn't 'cause I sucked my lobotomized brain out through my ear with a vacuum cleaner five minutes before I bought the game. Luckily for anybody who's going to be scared away from this game by this review, I don't need a brain to know that this game sucks.

Gameplay: 1/10

Throughout gaming history, companies have tried and failed to create a game that was both educational and fun. Once upon a time, a company called Zono decided that it wasn't worth trying, and making a game that wasn't educational OR fun would be a better idea. The game has the History Channel's logo on it, so you would expect it to teach you something about the crusades, or at least have something to do with the crusades. This game has nothing to do with the Crusades.

The game plays like a version of Age of Empires/Warcraft III that was stripped down to the bare bones, and then had the bones stripped down to the marrow inside the bones. Basically, it tries really hard to be an RTS, and fails because a big part of real time strategy games is STRATEGY. An RTS without strategy is like Genesis without Peter Gabriel, and that's what this game is.

The gameplay itself is stupid and boring, :

1) Build an army
2) Walk until you find the enemy army
3) Blindly attack the enemy
4) Defeat the enemy if your army is bigger, lose if it's not
5) Repeat.

A big part of games like this has always been the strategic the positioning of troops, if you're good at planning and set up your troops in certain formations you can bring down a big army with a small army. Unless you're playing Crusades. The levels are stupid and linear, you've got a canyon thing that you've got to walk down and find enemies, and when you kill all the enemies you win. The only resource is gold, and you can either find it in chests or pick it up from slain enemies instead of harvesting it like in a real RTS game, making it more of a RTS/Isometric RPG. Okay, genre crossovers can work when they're done right. Activision didn't do this right.

The crusaders are limited to archers, knights, some kind of stronger knight, and priests (healers). The Muslims have the exact same unit types with different appearances, and are all horribly sereotyped. The muslim soldiers all have names like "Al-ali Ameer Jataah Abdul", (which WAS an actual name from the game), and I swear the voice acting was either done by Ben Jahrvi from Short Circut 2 or the elephant from Diddy Kong racing.

Control: 4/10

Point, click, watch as your units do the exact opposite of what you say.

Music: 4/10

Simply put, the music sucks. It's some 3-second long flute/violin-ish thing that makes the FFCC Title screen music sound good.

Storyline 1/10

Like I said, the storyline has NOTHING to do with the actual crusades, it's just a bunch of random missions set in the same time period. I've met five year olds that knew more about the crusades than this game teaches.

Graphics: 6/10

The graphics aren't too bad, but the textures repeat WAY too much. There are hardly any troops in the game, and no variety in the units (not even the way AOM did it with Male/female peasants) makes the whole game look stupid.

r8ing: It gets a 3/10, which means that it's good for an Activision value game, but still bad.

Buy/rent: This game cost me $5, which means it cost me half as much as my used copy of The Complete Ultima VII. This game is nowhere near half the game U7 is. If you really thirst for a low-priced RTS, check the bargain bins for Celtic kings or Tzar and let this game rot.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 06/13/06