Crusaders of Light

There are games that capture you with their storytelling, addictive gameplay, wonderful community and the ability to reach the height of your power through sheer skill and dedication alone. However, there are also games that favor style over substance, relying on breathtaking graphics to compensate for whatever it may be lacking, sometimes trying to compensate for pretty much everything else. These games can be considered "guilty pleasures," and Crusaders of Light is one such guilty pleasure.

Originally launched on the mobile platform for Android and iOS, the game garnered so much popularity due to the graphics it had that the developers wondered how would it fare on the Windows system for PC gaming. While their hunch on whether or not the game would have success was correct, the manner in which they ported the game is a bit lacking.

The moment you first launch the game, you are prompted to create your first character, and that is where the first deceit starts. As soon as you lay your eyes on the characters, you can create and the way they look, move and feel, you might consider that you are embarking on one of those AAA games. The graphics are over the top, with a heavy emphasis on the fantasy element but in an anime style, especially the exaggerated armor and weaponry involved. Admittedly though, the game looks excellent from a graphics point of view, and one should wonder what phone you should have had to run it efficiently when it first launched.

All is fun and games when you create your character, but that is when you realize that most of the fun part is gone by now. Like the character designs, the game is pretty unoriginal, capitalizing on story arcs "borrowed" from other titles, although the fact that it is full of cutscenes is worth praising. The problem, however, is that the game is too full of cut-scenes and automatic functions, making the game to feel like a no-brainer. For example, you have auto-walking towards quest objectives, auto-attacking monsters and auto-completing non-combat-related quest tasks, which leads to a low sense of accomplishment, since defeating a boss the size of half your screen with two buttons is a bit underwhelming.

You don't need to read about the game to figure out it started on the mobile platform, since the interface looks the part, being ridden with banners and offers for in-game currency. More so, some elements of the UI are inaccessible to the player, such as the skills tab where you can see the details of the various abilities you have. While they are inaccessible or very hard to find it is currently unknown, this is a problem considering sometimes you have just to hit a target with your spells to figure out what it does.

If you're a gamer that loves graphics above all else and loves wicked looking armors, weapons, and spells, then Crusaders of Light is a title you should consider playing. However, if you love control and an engaging story, you should stay away from this title.