>>310121
Review:
In terms of game-play, I found the entire campaign to be astonishingly balanced. Melee is terrifying, especially being on the receiving end. The AI is very well scripted, as the enemy units will work as proper rival squads and use lots of dirty little advantages to take you out. Since scarcity, attrition, and tactics play such a vital role in Crusade, it's terrifying to watch enemy squads dynamically loot the bodies of their fallen comrades, pick up their gear and healing supplies, bandage themselves, and resume the fight as your ammo pools are swiftly dwindling since you decided to kite and play the defense game with a sniper rifle or focus-fire-to-the-eyes single shot assault rifle. Firefights become the stuff of terror and adrenaline, exactly like the artwork for Tactics. The enemy is not afraid to call in reinforcements, flank you with select-fire assault rifles, rush you when you're reloading with the now deadly melee weapons or simple plated boot to the face, all the while one or two marksmen with equal or better stats than your best sniper are providing expert overwatch. Mid-game fights make the original campaign look easy; the late-stage missions will exhaust every drop of creativity and tactical genius you possess to succeed: every time I thought I found an exploit or a way to cheese, the mod had redundancies to punish me very thoroughly especially on Tough Guy mode. The story puts you in a lot of scenarios which require very quick thinking, again especially without saves, which I appreciated. My game was set on Normal, yet I found it very taxing even on this setting (much harder than the original campaign on Very Hard, matter-of-fact). Setting it to Hard or Very Hard may likely break balance. Setting it to Easy as an experiment didn't seem to do much for the end map that I got soft-locked on, as it's still punishing. The game provides almost zero experience for killing common enemies: this opens up a lot of opportunities for creative game-play. Combined with the scarcity of ammo and supplies, it's best to think very hard about what you want to do and how.
For audio, outside of one or two lower quality sounding pieces that play with an introduction of important characters early on, I found all of it to be excellent. All of the weapons sound terrifying and effective, because they are. The ambient sound effects and music choices are all good. Although not on the same level as Fallout: Sonora or Nevada in terms of original OST or sound engineering, this is understandable given that the team appears to be only one person.
Visuals-wise, it remains a 10/10. I'm astounded at what the creator managed to do. All of the environments feel like something out of Tactics or the original two series. I think only one part was lifted from the campaign (a library). The creator was able to cleverly borrow and use assets from other Interplay / Black Isle games, which surprisingly fit in quite well.
Writing-wise, the game surprisingly improves as time goes on. I found fewer and fewer typos or misspellings, along with the dialogue being more concise. For not having access to any voice-acting, combined with extremely sparse options in Tactics to provide more dialogue or readables compared to Sonora, Nevada, or Fallout 2's Restored cut characters and mission sequences, it holds up enough. The game has some classic Fallout darker story or gameplay elements in it, essentially the same level as the original titles but not as dark as Nevada (namely, no pedophile rings or gang-rape sequences). You can kill kids again, though.
In terms of implementation, this is where things break down in my review. When the creator gets things right, he gets them very right; when he does not, the game hurts you a lot. Some cool side quests and characters were completely inaccessible to me due to broken scripting, including one playable companion. Details removed or changed for convenience often lead to major issues elsewhere down the road, such as vehicles being only existent off-screen: with the loss of trunk space, if you can't carry your gear in the wrong place, at the wrong time, it's lost forever which is devastating if they were quest items or unique gear on a fallen companion which turns the tide of the late game. And if your companion(s) die, chances are it's a location that will wipe your entire squad due to an enemy AI ambush already if you try to loot the body. Also, the convenience of the complete removal of random encounters has an important side effect of not allowing you to actually grind gear or EXP. There's a few spots that allow you to farm EXP (I originally confused these as exploits), but they seem to have been implemented or left-in as a way to partially band-aid this problem. Theoretically, you can farm and invest into Steal or Barter to get the gear needed, but it'll be brutal. However, the shine of the last number of missions and their scripting is where the mod really comes to light: Tactics is transformed from a squad-based game to several platoons / a company sized tactics game. Watching other friendly AI squads face off against enemy AI squads, with your intervention actually mattering (and their actions affecting you) made this fantastic. I really hope this gets even further fleshed out and refined if the creator updates the mod, as the entire mod is really worth the last two missions alone. I've never been in greater terror, absolutely surviving on my wits and every last item I scrounged and saved, until these sequences. The original campaign is child's play in comparison.
Notes:
- Small, Big, and Energy weapons were merged, almost assuredly for game-play length reasons. Since scarcity of ammo and limited characters is the new game-play, this actually works out just fine. Weak characters not being able to handle really big weapons, Science-based characters getting some advantages with energy weapons, and so on makes this still work in terms of realism logic. This added flexibility actually greatly helps with the tactics involved.