Crusaders Review - RTS for your Android

Crusaders is an RTS game that launched on the android market several months ago. That's right, real rts. Its one of the few real time rts games available on the market today, is it any good?

Last year we reviewed Castle Warriors which was the only claimed RTS game on the market at the time. Not only was it not an RTS game, but it also wasn't very good. This time around Crusaders is closer to its original genre then Castle Warriors ever was (or claimed to be).

When you start a battle, you have a castle which you must defend, and two structures on either side of said castle that act as barracks for your units, providing more when your population drops below the (very) low cap of 32 units.

Crusaders has you playing as one race/team all the time.  The humans have 4 different types of units, including soldiers, archers, clerics - healers and heros - super units. We found this makes gameplay seriously lack variety and replay value in the long-term.

Controls work fine for this type of game, I couldn't even imagine another workable control scheme for RTS games on touchscreens, however the controls could react smoother, like when placing archer towers.

The towers jump half way across the screen on a tablet, and off the screen on a phone. As you could probably imagine this makes placing them a major annoyance encumbered by too much guesswork when positioning them. Archer towers are the only buildings that the player actually gets to build, leading to more blandness. You can however upgrade these towers with more defenses and stronger attacks in levels.

Wrap Up:

Crusaders is loaded with potential, but feels rushed to market with no campaign, story or online multiplayer. It hits the satisfying RTS spot on Android if for only a few minutes at a time without making the mark on quality or level of content we've come to expect from the genre.

6/10

Editor's Note: There is only the Japanese version available on the Android Market now. At some point the English version was taken down but should you still want to give this game a try you can find the English version of Crusaders on the Amazon App Store for $2.99.