The History Channel: Crusades

by ACTIVISION

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000ZUA78
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: December 5, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #50,835 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Nice and Gruesome, but a Historical Parody, April 26, 2008

By 

K. Murphy "Fortune favors the Bold" (The thriving metropolis of Masury, OH) - See all my reviews

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: The History Channel: Crusades (CD-ROM)

I will review this game from two perspectives-gameplay and the historical context.

The game itself is plenty of fun. It is, as a previous reviewer noted, very straightforward and simplistic; there is very little of a real storyline behind it and there are only four units, all infantry, on each side-knights/holy warriors, spearmen/swordsmen, archers, and clerics.

You can only have up to 25 men in each level, so I find myself killing off all my infantry so I can raise more elite archers and heroes. Like most games of this nature, experienced archers are the key and the other units are useful mostly for protecting them. When an archer has four kills, he shoots flaming arrows that kill his target much quicker, and when he has seven kills he shoots two arrows at a time. The archers have low health and are almost worthless in hand-to-hand, though, so protecting them with the stalwart infantry units is essential. The priests heal your injured men, and do so quicker with each of the treasures you capture.

Every level gives you a particular objective, but basically just kill everybody else. It is a very simple game and the small numbers of units mean that there isn't much room for tactical messing around like in Total War or even Age of Empires games. It can give you a heck of a challenge, though; in the earlier levels the enemy will target your fire archers and in the later ones they will have fire archers of their own-the last levels of both campaigns are infuriatingly challenging.

Now, for the topic of historical accuracy. One reviewer noted that he had hoped there would be more historical-type information in the game; for anyone reading this who would buy it for that reason-don't. From a historical perspective this game is good for a laugh. Besides being set in the `Crusades' (a vague term at best that could be anywhere from the 11th to the 15th Cents), nothing is said of the time or place. The Crusaders are fighting to capture Jerusalem, suggesting a 1st Crusade setting, while the Eastern faction is fighting to defend Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire sacked in the 4th Crusade. So technically, we can't even tell if the Eastern faction is Muslim or Byzantine.

The Crusaders are fairly accurate to life, but the Eastern figures are comically stereotyped. The holy warriors are naked to the waist and use gigantic scimitars of a sort never actually used in the Crusades-the real elite of Muslim armies were armored mounted men with lances and straight swords like their Catholic foes. The previous reviewer's observation about the gibberish talk of the `Muslim' clerics is also correct. So the Eastern side does not look accurate at all, though there is nothing really `pro-Christian' about this game like another past reviewer felt the need to say.

So, in short, buy it if you want to play a small-scale war game, but don't if you want a historical guide or a grand strategy game.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Historical Schmistoriacal, December 9, 2005

By 

J. Spencer Daniel (Chicago, IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The History Channel: Crusades (CD-ROM)

This game is okay and has been a good diversion for a couple of hours so far. It's not very complicated - there are only four different unit types, and you start out with all four at the beginning of the game. There are no cutscenes. There is hardly any story. There isn't really any instruction manual. It's a pretty simplistic real time strategy game, but it's fun. Hence three stars.
However, I bought the game while looking for materials for an independent study in the Crusades. One of the previous reviewers said that it had great historical information, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the heck s/he was talking about. Not only is it nonhistorical in its lack of any historical cutscenes or storyline, it is almost totally ahistorical as well (one of the missions is to find the Ark of the Covenant, the priests magically heal your characters, etc.). In addition, it is not very culturally sensitive - e.g., the Muslim clerics chant gibberish that only sounds vaguely like Western stereotypes of Arabic. But for all that, it's a lot of fun to hack up heathens and infidels (whether Eastern or Western - you can be either!)

4 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Crusades, March 8, 2004

By 

Ryan Turnbull (Gatineau, Quebec Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The History Channel: Crusades (CD-ROM)

This game gives great historical information and is a blast to play. The one problem being, yous pend too much time on it! I am not sorry that I bought it at all. I think the attitude might be a bit pro-Christian, which is the reason I did not give it 5 stars.