Crusader: No Remorse

I'll get straight to the point here (deep breath). Little Big Adventure (developed by Frenchies Adeline and published by Electronic Arts) was. to put it bluntly, the canine's wedding tackle. Not only did it look good and play brilliantly, but it was packed with more humour, plot twists and brilliant animations than your average Tim Burton film. The only thing you might be tempted to raise the slightest niggle about (unless of course you're Frenchophobic) was that there wasn't enough shooting to be done. Yep. I know it wasn't really that sort of game, but it would have been nice just to pull out a semi-automatic and let rip at one of those stupid lardy elephant thingies that lollop around carrying rifles, just once or twice. Call me irresponsible (call me unreliable, hey -just call me. okay!), but the whole design and layout of the game was crying out for a bit of 3D isometric shoot 'em up action (like a sort of real-time UFO. but with nicer graphics). Just a little would have sufficed so as to satisfy the gun-toting gamesplayer taking a break from Doom and not to upset the fluffy bunny brigade. Not exactly a missed opportunity on the part of Adeline, but something to think about for next time, maybe.

I wannit, and I wannit now!

Origin obviously felt the same way. and. being American rather than French, it naturally couldn't produce a game that didn't feature (a) lots of different weapons and (b) lots of people on which to practise using them on.

The result is a game that looks and plays a lot like the aforementioned LBA (it too features quite stunning svga graphics and a rather nifty character control mode), but with guns. Lots of guns in fact, and lasers and rocket launchers and grenades. You name it if you can kill or maim somebody with it. it's probably in there. On top of this there are robots that you can commandeer who will quite happily trot (or hover) off and kill for you. as well as no end of power-ups to stumble across and weapon enhancers to buy. What's more, the player environment is fully interactive and damage results from every round fired. Like it quite proudly states in the pre-release blurb: "If you can see it, you can shoot it."

There are puzzles too. however, just in case you get fed up with shooting at baddies (and oil drums and robots and lights), or you run out of ammo. And if you combine this with over one and a half hours of fmv (to link all the action together) and a rather useful teleport system that transports you to different parts of the massive 16-level playing arena, it all starts to look rather jolly.

Not so much LBA Part Two with Knobs On. more LBA Now I'm Mad and I've Got a Gun. God bless America.