Cyanide has done a compelling job of lacing the war between a triune of spiritual forces-the Wyld, Wyrm, and Weaver-with ecological concerns.
#Crossbow crusade review series
The strongest part of Earthblood is its lore, which is pulled from the tabletop role-playing series The World of Darkness that includes both Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Vampire: The Masquerade. There’s a level here, in which Cahal has to find a way to kill two prison inmates without being detected, that may have you wishing you were in the terrain of Hitman, where you can infiltrate a locale and assassinate your targets in a variety of ways. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that it undermines itself with cumbersome stealth mechanics, especially on higher difficulty levels.Įarthblood suffers from an identity crisis, one that doesn’t stem from the differences between Cahal’s human and four-legged Lupus forms, but from Paris-based developer Cyanide’s failure to give players more than one way to proceed through a level and never making that linearity feel particularly purposeful. Earthblood, then, has the essential components to be a righteous, fast-paced action game.
Once he transforms into his two-legged, half-wolf Crinos form, and to the beat of a heavy metal soundtrack that’s as loud as his roar, he knocks foes and objects alike into oblivion in a blur of rushing, swiping ultraviolence. That’d be enough to drive an ordinary man to violence, but Cahal is also a werewolf. For good measure, the corporation fridges Cahal’s wife in the game’s prologue and later kidnaps his daughter. Indeed, if the unsubtly named Endrom weren’t dangerous enough with its reckless oil drilling, it’s also injecting its biofuel-the titular Earthblood-into its employees, transforming them into demons. Louis IX’s crusade of 1248–54 was similarly well funded and carefully planned.Cahal, the jacked-up protagonist of Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood, channels his rage into a righteous crusade to save the environment-a show of eco-terrorism that will feel more than justified. Richard’s wealth enabled him to bail out and draw into his service other crusaders who had exhausted their resources in Palestine. Their cargoes also included foodstuffs, hay, horseshoes, nails, crossbow bolts and much else. His ships carried siege engines and a prefabricated castle. The sailings of his ships were carefully coordinated and he arrived at Acre in June 1191 on schedule.
Richard set up a forward mustering point at Messina. Richard’s expedition in the 1190s was exceptionally well funded, through the sale of offices, the extortion of money from Jews and, later, money taken from the king of Sicily, as well as plunder from Cyprus.
In the film King Richard and the Crusaders, released in 1954, Virginia Mayo, playing Lady Edith Plantagenet, got to mouth the immortal line, ‘War! War! That’s all you ever think about, Dick Plantagenet!’ Well, there was a lot to think about, and in fact Richard I comes out surprisingly well in Christopher Tyerman’s expansive and penetrating account of the complexities of going on crusade. Having read it, they may well give up on the idea, for there is more to crusading than one might have imagined: propaganda, recruitment, finance, logistics, health and safety, supplies and strategy. Anyone who has put launching a crusade on their bucket list should read this book first.
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