In a lot of ways,
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has all the makings of a classic game, but alas, it was a mere warm up. In light of difficulties with playing this game in the modern age and the advances that would be made just a couple years later on
Fate of Atlantis and other LucasArts games,
Crusade could feel obsolete, but when viewed apart from the legacy of its developers, it does offer some entertainment.
The gameplay itself is what you would expect if you've played
The Secret of Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and so on, with all the good and bad baggage that such a similarity bears. Many of the game's crucial items are easy to miss, and the puzzles themselves are not always logical. One saving grace is that many of the problems that Indy encounters have multiple solutions, but some of them, such as the fist fights may prove to be more trouble than they're worth, and the dialogue trees are more luck than charming fast-talk. I can't say that I didn't enjoy this game, but unless you have a walkthrough handy, be prepared for a lot of trial and error.
Worst of all, though, is that in order to complete the game, you need a replica of the Grail diary that was included in the packaging but is not included with this Steam version. I owned a retail copy of this game as a child, but it's as lost as the Holy Grail is at this point. Scans of the Grail diary are found easily enough online, but even so, the requirement of the game's original packaging is definitely a strike against
Crusade, especially in an age in which a retail copy would be impossible to find.
That's not to say that there's nothing to recommend the game. Like you would hope, the plot moves along at a brisk pace similar to that of
the movie and is entertaining no matter how familiar you are with the story, which has been changed in a few, mostly trivial ways, in order to better facilitate the action. It also has plenty of the humor that you would expect from a LucasArts game, even making me laugh out loud in a few instances. While the sound is unfortunately composed primarily of repetitive chiptunes of the movie's score and irritating blip and bleep sound effects, the graphics have aged quite well with plenty of color and detail despite the number of pixels.
The game also has an interesting scoring system that gives you a point for every possible action in the game. Some of these, such as throwing a punch at a certain infamous German, result in Indy's death, but upon reloading the game, the point for such actions will carry over. This was a fairly new idea at the time, and it certainly gives some incentive to replay the game, with a maximum possible score of 800. I finished the game with 390, so there will be plenty for the more obsessive-compulsive of gamers to do.
The primary problem, then, with
Crusade is that every success of this game was bettered by
Fate of Atlantis, which is also a good deal longer, has considerably improved sound (including excellent voice acting), and has far more intuitive gameplay. Still, if you're interested in either of these titles, you'd do well to pick up Steam's
LucasArts Adventure Pack, which includes both of them, as well as
Loom and
The Dig, another personal favorite. They're also sold on GOG if you prefer a DRM free version. Even if you buy it as an individual game, though,
Crusade is a worthy game for the initiated, but mileage may vary for newcomers.