Crusader: No Remorse is a first-person scrolling platform game. It's Super Mario Brothers with grenade launchers, blast packs, and exploding barrels of radioactive waste.
What makes this game great fun is the feeling of being in a real world. The texture of the surroundings is extremely fine-grained. Every object your bullets hit reacts uniquely. Video cameras explode, swivel chairs spin. And, of course, the villains scream and die.
The back story, despite its one-dimensionality (good-guy Rebellion versus evil and oppressive World Economic Consortium), is funny. It's like the whole world is run by Blockbuster Video - or the Feds in Snow Crash. After completing a mission, you can go to a little TV in the rebel base and watch the nightly news put on by the consortium, whose coverage of your depredations is, to say the least, slanted.
Crusader does have its low points. There are a lot of tedious puzzles that drag the game out without making it more interesting. Your onscreen character, the Silencer, often moves clumsily. The game is disconcertingly buggy. And the many video clips do nothing to elevate multimedia's low standards for acting and writing.
But it's a blast to play. And the virtual-world realism here heralds a great step forward in computer game design.
Crusader: No Remorse: US$60. Origin Systems Inc.: (800) 245 4525, +1 (512) 434 4375. On the Web at www.ea.com/origin.html.
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