Posted June 12, 2013
Whew...finally finished no regret after finishing no remorse. No nostalgia here, this is the first time I played either title. I was determined to knock them both out and off of my backlog for good, but I can't deny that I was ready for no regret to end about five levels earlier than it did. These games, while basically worth playing (especially with a controller through e.g. joy2key) are also rather . . . tedious. I'm not even going to talk about the controls, beyond saying that with joy2key, there's simply no reason to play this with the awful keyboard or mouse setup everyone complains about. Had to leave a few keys on the keyboard but since you can map multiple keys to a button with joy2key, a fully playable setup is achievable with a gamepad that alleviates most of the control complaints one could have, although obviously this does not solve those issues that are intrinsic to the game engine, such as the Silencer's relatively slow response to input and tendency to autoaim at scenery when you're trying to hit something dangerous nearby.
THE GOOD
Lots of explosions and action.
Lots of different guns.
Cheesy FMV can be pretty great.
Decent soundtrack.
THE BAD
I thought both games were too long, given how repetitive the gameplay is. Especially #2 (no regret) - although I have read it's actually shorter than #1, seemed to drag on forever. Once you've played through a few levels of either game you've basically seen all the tricks the game has to offer, but it just keeps going, and going, and going. That said, #2 is the better game in terms of consistent challenge and some new control options IMO.
Although there's lots of different guns, the designer's choice to make most of the cooler weapons kill enemies in ways that prevent them from dropping supplies makes them far less useful and fun than they should have been. I went through both games using primarily the wimpier guns that didn't make people die in cool ways just so I could find supplies. Stupid design decision IMO.
Although folks here can and have debated the meaning of the phrase "aged poorly", I think these games fit the bill. The tiny viewable area is a big culprit, as it severely restricts your ability to really do any tactical planning on how to attack an area when you can only see a tiny chunk at a time. The engine is super-clunky and even after the controls became second nature, I was frequently cursing the Silencer's tendency to pause ever so slightly before executing commands like "roll" and "crouch" which resulted in lots of cheap deaths. While you can kind of make a meta-game out of this by training yourself to compensate for this issue (e.g. treating it as a gameplay element instead of an artifact of the engine) I quickly grew tired of it and took to save-spamming fairly early on to avoid repeating too much of the game. While basically fun, the Crusader games are definitely not ones I'll be eager to revisit any time soon.
THE GOOD
Lots of explosions and action.
Lots of different guns.
Cheesy FMV can be pretty great.
Decent soundtrack.
THE BAD
I thought both games were too long, given how repetitive the gameplay is. Especially #2 (no regret) - although I have read it's actually shorter than #1, seemed to drag on forever. Once you've played through a few levels of either game you've basically seen all the tricks the game has to offer, but it just keeps going, and going, and going. That said, #2 is the better game in terms of consistent challenge and some new control options IMO.
Although there's lots of different guns, the designer's choice to make most of the cooler weapons kill enemies in ways that prevent them from dropping supplies makes them far less useful and fun than they should have been. I went through both games using primarily the wimpier guns that didn't make people die in cool ways just so I could find supplies. Stupid design decision IMO.
Although folks here can and have debated the meaning of the phrase "aged poorly", I think these games fit the bill. The tiny viewable area is a big culprit, as it severely restricts your ability to really do any tactical planning on how to attack an area when you can only see a tiny chunk at a time. The engine is super-clunky and even after the controls became second nature, I was frequently cursing the Silencer's tendency to pause ever so slightly before executing commands like "roll" and "crouch" which resulted in lots of cheap deaths. While you can kind of make a meta-game out of this by training yourself to compensate for this issue (e.g. treating it as a gameplay element instead of an artifact of the engine) I quickly grew tired of it and took to save-spamming fairly early on to avoid repeating too much of the game. While basically fun, the Crusader games are definitely not ones I'll be eager to revisit any time soon.
