Game Reviews

Crusade of Destiny

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Crusade of Destiny

How much do you rate looks?

With Crusade of Destiny, developer DVide Arts has put together a reasonably competent Zelda clone: an action role-playing game with a relatively expansive world to explore, a variety of different monsters to run into, and a lengthy tree of combat skills to help you kill them.

But the terrible art direction and an almost complete lack of any detail on top of this basic framework mean it feels above average at best.

It was a time of darkness

The intro sequence is about as evocative as it gets, using crude line doodles and melodramatic voiceover to set up the basics.

There's an ancient kingdom which was threatened by a terrible evil long, long ago. You're a generic farmboy informed by the village elder that you need to help the queen with her plan to ensure the evil doesn't return by collecting the pieces of a mystic MacGuffin.

DVide Arts obviously put some effort into creating Crusade of Destiny's world and letting you interact with it.

While the framerate stutters every now and then, technically it's not a bad 3D world, comparable with an early N64 title.

The controls are smooth and responsive. You move with a virtual joystick, use three hotkeys for combat skills, and swipe the screen to rotate the camera.

Painting by level numbers

The gameplay is as familiar as the setting. You slaughter your way through endless respawning monsters, use your experience points to level up Melee, Magic, or Archery, collect what loot the enemies drop, and buy steadily better equipment with the proceeds.

It's all very solid, with no difficulty spikes or obvious bugs, and DVide Arts has fleshed it out somewhat with helpful spawn points and a fast travel system that cuts down on waiting times between each battle.

But it's hard to see anyone warming to the visuals. Crusade of Destiny looks as if a random member of DeviantArt drew it. There's an occasional bit of artistic flair, with some impressively huge bosses, but the low polygon counts and muddy textures rob them of much of their impact.

Magic formula wanted

More worryingly for an RPG, there's virtually nothing to the story.

Quest descriptions are little more than 'I want object X. Go and get it for me', which just leads you to wonder why you should care.

Crusade of Destiny isn't a bad game by any means, but beyond its 3D visuals it doesn't have anything to recommend it over other RPGs on the Android Market.

Crusade of Destiny

Crusade of Destiny is a competent stab at an action RPG, but there's not much to it beyond a basic gameplay model you've seen many times before
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Matthew Lee
Matthew Lee
Matthew's been writing about games for a while, but only recently discovered the joys of Android. It's been a whirlwind romance, but between talking about smartphones, consoles, PCs and a sideline in film criticism he's had to find a way of fitting more than twenty-four hours in a day. It's called sleep deprivation.