Written by Dan Gill
Writing retro reviews can be a funny old thing. As a writer you try to judge a game on its
merits, on how it plays right now. In
some cases there will obviously be some bias towards a title due to having
played and enjoyed it in the past, no matter whether it was any good or
not. For example, I quite enjoy
Gremlin’s C64 version of platform/shoot-em-up Future Knight, despite the fact it isn’t a particularly well
designed title (and received a critical panning and little commercial success
upon release), and a close friend (who shall remain nameless) enjoys 3DO’s
mostly awful Army Men titles. Still, despite all this we reviewers need to
put our past selves away and play a game with fresh eyes. With that in mind, I take on one of Ron
Gilbert’s early titles for Lucasfilm Games.
Readers of my somewhat sparse and sporadic past wordblurts
will know how fondly I look upon LucasArts’ point-and-click library, of which I
still feel the pinnacle is The Secret of
Monkey Island, a game about which many words have already been written. The
same can be said of Maniac Mansion,
the debut of the SCUMM engine. However,
poor old Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade – The Graphic Adventure (a snappy little title if ever there was
one), is often overlooked in favour of the aforementioned games, and its own
sequel – the rather spiffy Fate of
Atlantis. Despite being a movie
tie-in, Crusade manages to avoid the
early nineties trend of only being loosely affiliated with its source material
and dressed up as a platform/shooter/beat-em-up (like Wayne’s World on the Game Boy for example). Well, The
Graphic Adventure does anyway (an Action
Game was also released. It wasn’t
great)
The story follows the plot of the film where Dr Jones is on
the search for the Holy Grail, all the while dodging troublesome Nazis,
reuniting with his father and bumping into Hitler. The game looks pretty good for a title from
1989, losing the giant heads of Maniac
Mansion and Zak McKracke and recreating the environments from the
film in 16 glorious colours (although I played the CD ROM re-release which uses
an eye-melting 256 colours). Given the
limitations of the time, the team did an impressive job of creating the
locales. From the university to the
library, the backdrop to Indy’s search looks much nicer than anything being
produced by Sierra at the time.
Of course, such things are moot should the game not play
well. Thankfully, Crusade retains the humour of its predecessors while tightening up
the adventuring a little. A point system
is introduced (the Indy Quotient),
which scores you on how you overcome obstacles with some puzzles having
multiple solutions that affect the score you receive. This is quite novel for a LucasArts title and
adds a bit more replay value. On the whole,
puzzles are fairly logical and manage to keep the player thinking without being
too obtuse.
The one aspect of the game I’m not particularly keen on is
the awkward fighting system. Using
(ideally) the numpad on the keyboard allows Indy a variety of blocks and
punches with which to take on opponents.
My trouble with this was that it deviated from the adventure gaming I
was used to and seemed awfully fiddly and random. On a couple of occasions fights ended up with
me loading an older save to replay an entire section in order to attempt to
retain health, or to avoid the fight completely. Since this is an earlier SCUMM game it is
possible to lose/die and after being downed by a single punch over and over I
lost my patience and had to leave the game for a while. Perhaps this is more a sign of how games have
coddled me in recent years, or maybe indicative of how adventure game design
has improved over time, be it Monkey
Island’s insult sword fighting or The
Walking Dead’s QTEs. Either way,
this is my only real gripe and it didn’t sully my experience too much. It did also teach me to man up and get on with
it; another trait required of retro reviewers.
So, is Crusade
worth playing? If you’re a fan of
point-and-click adventures, absolutely.
It’s a game from a time that Lucasfilm was at a turning point, where
they would lose the cul-de-sac trappings of adventure game design for future
titles (at least for the most part), and one that shows the great writing and design
the company later became renowned for.
Sure, Crusade would be
improved upon by its stablemates, but it’s still worth revisiting. And I say that on viewing it with a fresh
pair of eyes rather than through the warm, fuzzy fondness often observed
through the Retroscope™. Should you
choose to play this, be safe in the knowledge you’ve chosen wisely.
7/10