karsvern ardeene ishmael
Kerrie Gingrich
The game is set during the Fourth Crusade and stars two crusaders. The player controls Denz de Bayle. He is joined by a partner, the Spanish mercenary Esteban Noviembre, who can either be controlled by AI or by a second player via online or local co-op.[citation needed] The game allows for various cooperative moves, such as grapple executions, team healing, and level progression.
The player controls their character in a third-person perspective, and can rotate the camera 360 degrees, for a full view of their surroundings. The game takes place in a linear adventure across Europe, including locations such as France, Croatia, Constantinople, and Syria.
The game is focused on fighting against waves of enemies, while the combat system is somewhat similar to both Assassin's Creed and Batman Arkham games[3][4] having some emphasis on blocking and countering. During the game, the player can pick up and wield up to four weapons, including swords, maces, axes, shields, and spears. All of the weapons will break, forcing the player to either conserve their weapons, or find more.
The characters have an ability to use the "Curse", an ability that lets them walk between the divide of Earth and Hell, giving them supernatural powers. The curse will grant the player stronger moves, faster movement speed, and an ability to see collectibles previously hidden. The curse will drain their meter as long as it is in use, and eventually, will kill the player.
In Syria, 1198, Jean de Bayle, a Crusader and member of the Knights Templar, fights in the Third Crusade to seek redemption for the hereditary "Templar's Curse" which afflicts his bloodline, as well as many other bloodlines with histories of grave sin. While defending the Krak de Chevaliers, fellow Templar Martin d'Algas tasks him with escaping the fortress with a prized relic. He does not return home to France, so his treacherous brother lays false claim to his castle, land, title, property, and murdering Jean's wife.
Jean's son Denz is a talented swordsman who has never let fear best him in a fight. He has become a skilled mercenary but also suffers from the curse. Helpless to reclaim his family's land from his uncle, he is pursued by the Angel of Death whose job is to claim the souls of those who bear the curse. While laying siege to Biron Castle under Boniface de Montferrat and his commander Baudouin de Flandre, Denz befriends the older and roguish Spaniard Estaban Noviembre, who is also pursued by Death. Martin is mortally wounded defending the castle. Denz later competes in a tournament to gain passage with the Fourth Crusade, taking Estaban as his squire. They defeat Flandre and his men, getting to join Geoffrey de Villehardouin's army en route to the Holy Land where Denz hopes to find Jean in hopes of taking back their castle together.
In 1202, the army falls under the command of Montferrat and Flandre but is unable to pay for Venician ships for transport to the Holy Land, so the Doge Enrico Donaldo makes a deal with the Crusaders to conquer Zara, a Croatian harbor city. Denz and Estaban disable a massive chain blocking the fleet from attacking the city and breach its walls, allowing the city to be sacked and they defeat Ladislaus, Zara's governor gone mad trying to control his curse. Montferrat then finds what he was looking for: a piece of the True Cross; Drenz and Estaban then realize that Montferrat does not seek redemption for his soul via this crusade, but rather is using it as a cover to hunt for relics towards an unknown goal.
In 1204 the Crusaders agree to help Alexius IV retake Constantinople from his uncle Alexius III and rescue his father, the Emperor Issac II, in exchange for paying the Venetians. During the siege, Denz and Estaban encounter Tatikios Lente, the powerful Byzantine captain of the guard. Alexius III flees and the city is retaken, but months later a coup led by Murzuphle, murdering Alexius and Issac, leads the Crusaders to storm the city again and sack it. Murzuphle is defeated but Denz spares him for revealing that two holy artifacts remained in the city: the Crown of Thorns (or rather its petrified thorns set in a crucifix) and the Spear of Longinus. The two turn against Montferrat and ally with Lentes and Princess Theodora, but Montferrat manages to take both relics and uses them to summon several massive demons from Hell. His plan is revealed to use the relics to leverage the forces of Hell in a brutal conquest of the world. Lentes and the princess are killed and Montferrat leaves for the Holy Land to hunt down Jean.
Denz and Estaban pursue Montferrat to Syria and the antiquated Krak de Chevalier, which is full of undead soldiers summoned via portals to Hell, which they are forced to purify and close. There they find the Shroud of Turin, the last relic which had been entrusted to Jean, with a message from Jean. Rather than use the relic to redeem their souls, Denz and Estaban depart for Cairo, Egypt, following Jean's instructions, but not before seeing "hell draws near" written on the Krak's walls with fire.
The PC version received "mixed" reviews, while the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions received "unfavorable" reviews according to the review aggregation website Metacritic.[5][6][7] Game Informer criticized the Xbox 360 version's slower combat and its "simple boss fights, brain-dead puzzles, and infrequent set pieces."[11] GameSpot defined the game as a "repetitive hack-and-slash that is marred by clumsy combat, poor dialogue, and some serious technical issues."[1] In Japan, where the PlayStation version was ported and published by Ubisoft on February 9, 2012, Famitsu gave it a score of one six, one seven, one six, and one seven for a total of 26 out of 40.[10]
The Cursed Crusade is a lot like Metal Gear Solid. Not in any meaningful gameplay sense, unless Solid Snake has taken to slowly swiping away at mindless enemies in a lacklustre hack and slash style, but it does love cutscenes. It loves them so much that it can't let ten minutes of gameplay go by without another one.
If Cursed Crusade wins any award, it should be Most Long-Winded Game of 2011. It opens with a lengthy cutscene, which leads into another cutscene which then leads into another. Finally, you get to start mashing the attack buttons and kill a handful of enemies. Then you get another cutscene. Skip a cutscene and the game just takes you to the start of the next cutscene. And so it goes on, tiny croutons of gameplay adrift in a sticky broth of heavy-handed exposition and endless peripheral chatter.
The story is a hodgepodge of thin medieval cliches, with an unwelcome side order of ludicrous supernatural guff. Our hero, Denz de Bayle, is cursed, you see. This means that he's able to transform into a sort of 12th century French oni demon, which fills the world with flames, gives him cool horns and... well, that's about it.
He supposedly hits harder and is more resilient when in his cursed form, but mostly you'll use these powers for more mundane matters like finding weak spots in walls and healing. In one of the game's only clever ideas, allowing your cursed power gauge to run dry results in health damage, although you'd have to be spectacularly bad at the game for that to happen.
Denz is joined on his generic quest by Esteban Noviembre, a wise-cracking Spaniard so formulaic that he might as well be called Paella los Sombrero. Together they chug through combat scenarios that never vary from the reliable old standby of having a bunch of dudes run towards you and then take it in turns swinging their swords in your direction.
The game is playable with two players, of course, which means that occasionally both characters will have to stand next to a scenery item - a wagon, a crank, a door - and press X at the same time to move it. This is pretty much the extent of the game's co-operative requirements.
It's all about the combat, really, since between cutscenes that's virtually all there is to do. Cursed Crusade has the beginnings of a decent fighting system, with a complex web of different abilities depending on which weapons you're holding. A sword and shield combo offers different attacks to a spear and shield. Dual-wielding two swords opens up moves that are different to those available with a sword and mace.
UK REVIEW--One thing should already be clear about The Crusades: They were extremely unpleasant. A Christian military campaign quickly turned sour, with knights becoming little more than mercenaries as they rampaged around and sacked cities across the Holy Land. In short, it was a time of strife and bloodshed. And, if The Cursed Crusade is to be believed, it was a time when ludicrous supernatural curses occurred, weapons broke after a few hits, and soldiers repeatedly got stuck on walls. Almost everything about the game is broken in some way, and between the ill-conceived mechanics and glitches, one could almost believe that the game itself is cursed.
The Cursed Crusade tells the tale of a pair of crusaders: Denz de Bayle and Esteban Noviembre. They're on a quest to break the curse that haunts them. Pursued by Death and in the employ of the evil Boniface, they must reunite a bunch of holy relics and save their souls from eternal damnation. At least, that seems to be what the plot is trying to convey. The game is full of exposition, with cutscene after cutscene breaking up the action, but the plot never really goes anywhere. There are no twists and no major developments until the very end; thus there is little to warrant the two hours of cutscenes within the game.
Denz and Esteban might have made for a likeable duo, if the script were any good or if the cutscenes were well directed. Scenes cut out in the middle of dialogue while screen tearing plagues the cinematics. Denz and Esteban are well acted, but the writing itself makes the chemistry feel forced. There are attempts at humor in the second half of the game, but the jokes also fall flat. During one scene, which tries to ape the "This is SPARTA!" line from the movie 300, Denz's character model simply failed to load, making it farcical for all the wrong reasons.
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