Crusader: No Regret™

Let me start by saying Crusader: No Remorse is a personal favorite of mine. I loved the varied missions, the colourful characters and the plot which had great potential and even went into very dark places at times. The only thing that was truly lacking in the original game was the isometric gameplay, which was awkward, difficult to control and blatently flawed. A broken idea of taking a mouse controlling RPG engine and transferring it to past-paced action combat. However, this could be looked over in the original due to how great the games other attributes - story, character, level design - were, but the gamplay truly was the worst part of the original game. Crusader: No Regret, first and foremost, focuses on the flawed gameplay. The colourful characters and great character interactions from the original are missing and the plot is really simplified when compared to the original's evolving storyline. It doesn't feel like (and, apparently was never supposed to be) a sequel to the first game and simply feels like a half-baked add-on, like Mysteries Of The Sith is to Star Wars Jedi Knight. Crusader: No Regret doesn't add anything beyond the original game and, in my opinion, is severely lacking in comparison. The glaring problem to me is level design. Crusader: No Regret loses a lot of the open-style gameplay of the first, and has problematic levels where enemy placement is completely unfair (this happens in the first few minutes of playing) making the game a real pain to play. This poor design accentuates how awkward the Crusader games are to play, and it makes the game's flaws come to the surface, instead of burying them with greater attributes which appeal to players more than just it's gameplay. Crusader: No Remorse never got a true sequel, and upon playing this game I see why. There just wasn't enough to expand upon when it comes to gameplay, and including half-assed story about moon crystals did not help. I wouldn't recommend this game. I would recommend people just play Crusader: No Remorse and leave it at that, because Crusader: No Regret, in all honesty, is not worth the investment.

Pretty much the same except they ramped up the difficulty and added the ability to roll forward and sidestep while crouched. Also I liked the 4 weapon system more, now I have to carry like 10 weapons and I mostly use 3 or 4 of them, there are more items, but half of them are as useless as they were before I was having fun until I got to that mission where you only have 15 minutes to complete it, which is the opposite of what the game has taught me so far since the controls are so bad that I cannot rush, usually a mission takes me 2 hours to complete because I like to explore while I struggle with the controls, so yeah, I couldn't finnish the game, such a shame

It's 90% the same game except for new levels and a couple new death effects. Why the lower rating? It just felt...more constrained. The biggest thing was you no longer had a choice of purchasing any weapon you wanted. You were stuck with using whatever you picked up. As it happened, you get the machinegun and missile launcher but it took forever to find my favorites: the shotgun and bomblette launcher. The game was so much more boring to me with the weapons and I found yet I never had the choice of buying different ones like the original. Everything else: the level design and missions just seemed worse. Worse layout, worse pacing. Hard to describe but definitely not as fun as No Remorse.

I found No Regret to be far inferior to No Remorse. Firstly, the AI is advertized to be smarter and the levels more challenging. I played on Loose Cannon difficulty in which I completed No Remorse without cheating. I found that after the first two or three levels the "challenge" became annoying. I would load over and over again progressing very slowly through the game and eventually just decided to cheat and see where the story went. Unfortunately the story had no interesting characters and revealed very little new information about the world. The only positive addition from No Remorse is the new weapons which do offer some interesting deaths. I recommend playing No Remorse and skipping this one.

Origin made such great games in the dos era, not just the wing commander series but these crusader games. I love them so much, every pc setup I've had always included a dosbox setup with no remorse and no regret and others like privateer and ultima. But these days, gog takes the hassle out of it for by carrying them, thank you. Regret is more of everything remorse gives you, so yes, it's more hardcore, it forces you to make a plan to deal with situations, it forces you to learn how to use all your tools and to explore thoroughly. And yes it can seem too hard at times, but that's what quicksave and quickload are for. Unlike so many other titles, with the crusader series, it's not just the rose tinted nostalgia glasses you wear, these games are still going strong and are still relevant today. 6 bucks is a steal, I paid full price way back when and it was worth every penny.