It seems like everyone is doing mouse shooter games these days, which is cool with me, because some of them are actually damn fun.

Crusader Tank is a solid game where you play as a super tank sent to infiltrate the territory of some cult or other… the story was a bit too nerdy for me to bother reading in great detail…

Anyway, it’s a fun game and it looks pretty good too. The art is all rendered with high detail, and there are some nice touches like enemies being able to hide under the trees and such. The only thing I didn’t like was the variety in level art. Sure the actual layouts of each level change up drastically, but it’s always the same tree, oil tank, and dirt art over and over again, without so much as a pallet shift or anything to even TRY and make it look different.
The sound effects are pretty solid as well, but holy crap does the music ever want to make you want to stab your eardrums with a magnetic phillips-head screwdriver. The same short song loops non-stop for THE WHOLE GAME.

Ear-rape aside, the game is still rather enjoyable. While the game visually and audibly does not change much, the difficulty and strategy does. As you progress you run into bigger and badder enemy types, and you have to avoid barricade walls that will destroy you on contact.

I didn’t find the game terribly difficult, although the controls were rather uncomfortable. using the arrows AND the mouse on a laptop is a fast way to get carpal tunnel. If you have a separate keyboard on a desktop, this probably won’t bother you though.

While this game has several drawbacks, I still found myself playing for 20 minutes before my hand was too cramped to continue. The fun is there, I just hope you like the color brown.

[ Play Crusader Tank ]