Man, this game is a slog. You don’t want to play it. Believe me. It’s so badly designed on so many levels. It doesn’t even have a proper end. Yet, when you play, it is oddly compelling -- just to see whether you can beat it, or it’s going beat you. Still, don’t. Just don’t. For your sanity’s sake.

But one thing at a time… ‘The Cursed Crusade’ is a hack-and-slasher set during the time of, you guessed it, the Crusades. Which one(s) exactly isn’t exactly established. Or rather, if it is, the game’s throwing everything and anything related to the Crusades into a mixer, anyway. Jumps in time and locales make following the game’s time-line pretty hard to impossible. The story is about Denz, son of and himself a Templar, who is trying to break a family curse. Although, it’s more of an “everyone’s cursed, anyway, not just this particular family” deal. He’s hired to fight in the Crusades where he befriends Esteban, and hence the hacking and slashing can commence.

Gameplay-wise, it’s basic hack-and-slashing with forced Bro-op sequences, a buttload of QTEs, and crossbow shooting for good measure. The titular Curse offers little to enhance the experience, except maybe even more QTEs.
Enemies level up with you, meaning you have to flail at them several times in always the same way. It gets annoying instead of challenging rather fast. The levels are oftentimes irritatingly designed, very much not helped by forced camera angles. There’s even one level that is entirely played like a 2D brawler, for some reason. I could see this working as some kind of reference to The Olden Days™, but, really, the game is trying to take itself too serious. Incidentally, it’s failing at that, too, with stonily delivered references to the likes of Frank Miller’s/Zack Snyder’s ‘300’.

To top all this off, there’s exactly one female character in this game. Which, to be fair, could be justified with “It’s medieval war, for chrissake! There were no women”. Yet, when said female character is introduced -- she doesn’t even have a speaking role, but is mute instead.

If all this doesn’t throw you off already and you still want to play it because you want to hunt for achievements, be warned that the fighting system’s flaws make it a chore and ordeal to beat the game in Nightmare mode [the hardest difficulty].

There’s one really good thing, though: The levelling system. Pieces upon pieces are added to your armour when levelling up, and hundreds of different -- and rather brutal -- moves can be unlocked for the myriad of weapons/combinations. There is something compelling hidden under all the other bad decisions, which is sadly not brought to its full potential.