I was almost put off picking this up with the negative reviews re: the controls.

But in practice, it seems to play reasonably well. Admittedly trying to use it with the mouse is horrendous. But strict keyboard control works decently. My only complaint is I wish it was easier to figure out precisely where you are aiming.

Anyone else not find the controls that bad?

When a game doens't use WASD+mouse or has full Xbox360 controller support 75% percent of the reviewers will say the controls suck, which simply has to do because most of them were born after the 80's.

I think the controls work fine, I use NumLock so the keypad rotates the Silencer and use Shift to rotate faster and use rolling for linear movement.
The aimingsystem could indeed have been better.

Well, to be fair, I don't find the controls to be all that bad, but they could have been better. There's an option to use arrow keys and regular keyboard keys for actions, which work better for me than having everything cramped up in the numpad (I seriously don't understand why some people prefer to have everything numpad controlled, it just becomes a cluster of fingers accessing keys on top of each other). I'm also not a huge fan of using numpad 8, 4, 6 and 2 to control the character, maybe I'm too used to the arrow keys and WASD/IJKL, and that blank space (5) really rubs me the wrong way. Perhaps I'm just a "1983-born casual" that doesn't know how good the "glorious days of numpad" were, but I definitely prefer the arrow keys over the numpad directional input.

Still, both Crusader games run on DOSBox, if you don't like the key mappings you can just use the DOSBox built-in mapper by pressing Ctrl+F1 while in the game.

Agreed. The control scheme isn't that bad once you get used to it.
A game with a weird control scheme that practically requires the NumPad keys is Die by the Sword.

Speed of input response in Cruader series is tied to the gamespeed. Luckily since the crusader games use DOSBox you can play with the Ctrl+F11 and Ctrl+F12 combos to slow down/speed up the game to your liking.


Worse case, if you have a cramped keyboard, remapping keys with the DOSBox key remapper is the answer as groze mentioned.

The mouse controls in this one are all over the place, even worse than it was with Ultima 8 Pagan (which i think is a precursor to the Crusader Engine).

Keyboard Only might be an option, also reducing your mouse DPI and tickrate via the mouse profile can ease it a bit eventually.
However compared to some of the games from the same era, I have to say that Cruasders controls weren't great to begin with. In hindsight i assume the graphical fidelity made up for it back in the DOS days.

In my experience, I definitely had to get used to the controls; it took a bit of time for everything to feel more-or-less comfortable, and after spending around 10 hours with No Remorse I still tend to roll in the wrong direction sometimes. It doesn't help that this is an isometric game that features platforming elements...don't know what the developers were thinking with that aspect of the game.

Like any old game PC game, though, I think most of the complaints about controls stem simply from the current player base not used to what the "standards" were at the time the game was released. Being used to arguably superior control schemes can hurt how much you can enjoy playing a classic game. For example, I never had a PC when the original Doom games came out, so when I got heavy into Doom around 2005, I was used to playing with mouse+keyboard, and thought it was crazy that people out there somehow played FPS games solely using the keyboard. I still can't do that without feeling awkward.

With the Crusader games, I move using the keyboard but I aim, shoot, and perform quick turns using the mouse. It's not perfect (I don't think any control scheme in these games are perfect), but it works pretty well.

Now after some tweaking and practice I`m getting along much better. And at times i think its worth it ;D
Nonetheless in any platforming situation its the old savescumming again...often the rewards for it dont make up for the hassle.

Theres something ZEN about coping with those old interfaces!

When I first played the Crusader games, I used the mouse. I didn't find the controls any trouble after a few moments of getting use to it.

Then later on, I started to use the free version of "Xpadder". I'm able to bind keyboard keys to my olde school early 2000's gamepad, and then I now play the Crusader games with the gamepad. I have to say, for me personally, the game is way better using the gamepad.

Now I play loads of dos games with my gamepad, including the Crusader games.

People love a good moan. I think writing this series off because of the controls is criminal. I grew up with a lot of isometric games on 8-bit computers, then later the Amiga, so I agree and didn't find the controls to be anywhere near as bad as some people make out. Not saying the controls are excellent, but they are efficient enough for this game and are a part of its DNA.

That said, on older isometric games I used a joystick then later a pad, so whilst it was not a massive stretch for me to start using keys in this genre, this was my first go of anything like this controlled via keyboard. I'm really not all that experienced with keys in general compared to some people and while there was a learning curve and the layout required some rejigging, I was fine, so if I can handle it...

Crusader's debatable controls are a lot to do with when this game came out. At that time there were no analogue sticks on game pads, and due also to the 2D you couldn't immediately take precise, direct lines 360 degrees from your current position. Mostly these types of games were either 'tank controls' or eight directions, input directly.

Re: Numpad.. Hats off to anyone who can control this with a numpad. To me that's like keyboard twister. I used the arrow keys. Wish I could use the numpad. Worth the learning curve?

Re: Mouse in this game: About as useful as a chocolate fireguard!

I played with keyboard only and honestly I didn't find the controls to be that bad. I read some of the reviews and I saw the controls elicit a good dose of criticism; certainly, they require some getting used to, but after a while you start to feel comfortable, and I don't think this game, so great in many respects, should be panned just for them. That said, on occasion I found myself struggling to make the Silencer do exactly what I wanted; jumping is awkward; aiming was frustrating in some situations, and I sometimes missed the ability to roll forward. But the game is more than playable, and I enjoyed it a lot for sure. But then, I'm an olde gamer.
(I'm talking about using the arrow keys, in particular; I didn't try with the numpad, because I started the game on a laptop, and I felt very uncomfortable with the mouse.) Yeah it often happened to me as well...

Also agree!
I played only using the numpad and the shift key, and it worked just fine.
Like one of the previous users said, players will complain about anything that isn't WASD.

I'm not going to defend the controls, they are pretty atrocious by today's standards. Hell even the port for the Playstation 1 had this super awkward setup.

Will say, that playing it on a keyboard alone is the way to go. It will still require some getting used to. But it is the best experience.

So I've just bought this, and had a play about. The keyboard controls are a bit tricky, but I don't see why this can't be mapped to an X360 controller (I've been gaming since Pac-man in arcades).

I was thinking left stick for direct movement (ie: numpad with caps off) and d-pad for tank controls. Other stuff on the L/R triggers, plus face buttons and right stick.

I was thinking of using Joy-2-Key, so I can map it externally (I hope DOSbox plays nice with J2K, I've had some games which ignore it).

Then I figured: has anyone configured this themselves? Might save me half an hour of fiddling. Any tips for controls?

I tried the mouse control, but it doesn't feel quite right.