First, a word of warning: The default version on Steam is a steaming pile. Please do yourself a favor and download ScummVM and transfer the game's source files from the Steam directory into ScumVM so that you can play the game far more as it was meant to be played. Unfortunately, the DOS binary is not included here, so DOSBox isn't an option. It's a truly brain dead decision. Even more egregious is that there is no ability to change the game's settings. We are stuck playing the game in a tiny window with no full screen option. No up-scaling is permitted. Worst of all is the abysmal smoothing filter that has been applied. It turns the game's charming VGA graphics into a hideous smear of indistinct blobs. Please do not subject yourself to this. Get ScummVM.

Lucas Arts adventure games are spoken of today in hallowed terms as a golden age of adventure gaming. And indeed they are. Game after game from Maniac Mansion to their magnum opus, Grim Fandango, Lucas Arts hit it out of the park with funny, exciting, superbly designed adventures. Unfortunately, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the worst of all the adventures produced by Lucas Arts.

Last Crusade isn't necessarily a bad game - indeed it has it's bright spots - but on the whole it is a poor experience. The game's fatal flaw is that it has a crisis of identity. Lucas Arts clearly sought to bring the thrilling action of Indiana Jones into adventure gaming. This is not, in principle, a terrible decision, but the result in Last Crusade is an unqualified mess. We are left with a terrible chimera of a game that is simultaneously very lite in the adventuring department and highly frustrating in the action department. The result is a game that leaves no one very happy. The game's immediate predecessor, Zak Mckracken and the Alien Mindbenders (why is this not on Steam?!) is a significantly better adventure game in nearly every way.

Last Crusade is one of the last of the Lucas Arts adventure games to allow dead ends where the player is unable to progress due to missing an item that is no longer available. This requires loading an earlier save, or worse restarting the game. It is also one of the few Lucas Arts adventure games that allows player death. If you are going to play the game, prepare yourself for plenty of saving and loading.

The game starts out on a very positive note. The interface has been improved to include a Look command, a welcome change from the much more primitive Read command used in Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken. We are still confined to use of the What Is command to identify onscreen items to interact with, as this was not changed until The Secret of Monkey Island. As in Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken, this will necessitate plenty of pixel hunting. Be prepared. The first two chapters of the game do not include any action sequences, and not surprisingly they are the best part of the game. There are a number of puzzles to be solved, and while not very difficult, they are enjoyable. The Grail Diary will be a useful tool in solving them, which is a very nice touch. We are also introduced to the game's best feature: branching. At many points in the game, we are given a number of ways to proceed and the choice made will affect future options and events in the game. It's a wonderful feature that would also be used in the superb Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. We do, however, encounter one of the frustrating features of the game: mazes. There are not an excessive number of them, but none of them are interesting and the result is mostly to waste the player's time. They add nothing of value to the game.

However, once the player reaches the third chapter, the game screeches to halt as the player is subjected to all the game's worst features. The absolute worst is the inclusion of a number of exceedingly poorly executed action sequences. The most numerous are the hand-to-hand fist fighting that Indy can (and almost certainly will) engage in. While the game can be beaten without combat, it will take a walkthrough or exhaustive trial and error to find the nonviolent path. Neither option is any fun. The fist fighting's primitive mechanics includes the player taking health damage for attacking once his stamina bar has been depleted. Unfortunately, this means the player is punished for staying on the attack - a very wise strategy in any fight. Indy has a series of blocks that he can use, but it is tedious and difficult to sustain no damage while Indy's stamina recovers. The near inevitable result is that Indy will lose health fight after fight until he is simply defeated by attrition - game over. It's frustrating and it isn't fun. There is also an airplane chase sequence that is maddening. As Indy's father is manning the machine guns, we are given no control over when we are able to shoot or where we shoot the numerous enemy planes that pursue Indy and his father. We are only able to wildly attempt to both avoid enemy fire and land a hit on enemy planes that have no such problem hitting our plane on the move. It's incredibly frustrating - sort of like playing Mario when you have no control over when Mario jumps. Fortunately, this sequence isn't required to progress, but failure will only necessitate further fist-to-first combat or more save-reloading to find the right dialog trees. None of this is fun in any way.

Overall, I give this game a thumbs down, and it is the only Lucas Arts adventure I can say that about. There are simply too many aggravating aspects to the game. Play the far superior Fate of Atlantis to be treating to some incredible Indiana Jones adventure gaming.

I bought this for the nostalgia and played through it, but I don't feel it aged quite as well as the other Lucasarts point and click adventure games. As a classic Lucasarts game from my childhood, it saddens me to give it a thumbs down, but I have to be honest here. I will tell why I didn't enjoy this game, and please keep in mind this is only my opinion. There are others who do enjoy the game.

The game starts off great, all the way through the catacombs. The puzzles are clever and well designed. I was really liking the game and it's quirky humor at this point. However, when you hit the castle section a couple of hours in, the game quickly starts to lose it's appeal.

A majority of the fun puzzles from the previous catacombs chapter are suddenly replaced with dialogue trees with the castle guards which follow no rhyme or reason. You'll have to keep playing through them over and over until you find the correct dialogue pattern to pass certain guards. You can die here (which ends the game) when you anger the guards and have to reload to a prior save just to try a different dialogue path. There's no clues whatsoever as to which dialogue you are supposed to be using with certain guards, it's literally just trial and error, which makes it a very frustrating, boring, and time-consuming effort.

I won't give away any spoilers, so I can only say that it continues to go downhill from here as the game becomes mostly just picking the right dialogue paths, giving the correct object to the correct person, and/or lots of clunky combat. I found myself not having much fun after the initial couple of hours of gameplay because it gets dull and repetitive.

You can also completely mess up your game and be unable to finish if you don't pay attention to a very minor inscription near the beginning of the game. I got to the end of the game and had to reload a prior save (lucky I had it!) just to read the inscription again. You will also need the original game manual in tandem with the aforementioned inscription to complete the game.

The Last Crusade leaves a lot to be desired and it really isn't as good as the other Lucasarts graphic adventure games. Spend an evening playing it for the nostalgia if you want, but that's about all I would recommend it for.

If you want your Indiana Jones fix, I would suggest trying out the superior and far better 'Fate of Atlantis' instead.

Highly frustrating game as there is so many ways to die and the boxing/combat mechanic is almost impossible to figure out. Even using a guide I died so many times and it was only my determination to finish that stopped me from switching off. However I like the random nature of some of the puzzle solutions, gives the game some replay value... but not enough for me to ever do this again.

Mixed feelings. This is a classic of the genre, of course, and I picked it up on Steam in order to finally beat a game that I'd eventually stalled out on in my childhood. [Mission accomplished, by the way]. ;-)

It's still really fun to make Indy run around doing stuff. And the game roughly follows the plot of the Last Crusade movie, so you're in for a good time. Plus, you've got all the usual LucasArts in-jokes and whimsy.

On the downside, this is clearly a game that people would have no patience for today, and [IMHO] with good reason. There's just too much that's arbitrary and punishing. Examples: no indication of the right way to talk yourself out of fights; items and information from near the beginning of the game that (if missed) can make the game unwinnable or virtually unwinnable toward the very end; stuff like that. The game isn't hard like Super Meat Boy is hard: SMB is a game where the task is clear but difficult. This is a game where the task is trivial but often totally inscrutable. That's not challenging; I'd instead call it unfair. :-/

Still, this is a great game, though it is a product of its time and shows its age. My recommendation? If you're interested, grab it, but play with a walkthrough by your side from the start. It is not a rewarding feeling to make it 80% of the way through the castle, discover that there's now no way to win, and then discover that your most recent save-game from before your mistake was ~1 hour of gameplay ago. :-/

You should get this in the LucasArt pack together with "The Dig" and "Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis". Its still a good game but Fate of Atlantis is better and The Dig is a wonderful game.

In a lot of ways, 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade' has all the makings of a classic game, but 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,' this is a game for die-hard Indy and LucasArts fans only.

The gameplay itself is what you would expect if you've played 'The Secret of Monkey Island,' 'Maniac Mansion,' 'Sam and 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 'Last 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. 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 'Last 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. Even by its own, though, 'Last Crusade' is a worthy game for the initiated, but mileage may vary for newcomers.

7/10

A great game, can be difficult at times and the graphics can be confusing at times, but if you really like Indiana Jones i suggest that you get this game. It really puts you in the retro perspective aswell if you like the retro games, it looks like it's from an Arcade machine.

If you need to feel joy and nostalgia in your life, you should play this and its sequel. Two great LucasArts games from a better time in our lives. Better than the movie.

If you read my previous recommendation of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis you know how much I love that old adventure. The Last Crusade is not a fun game though. Everything that was polished in the "sequel" you'll find here in raw state. Combat is bad, level design induces you to get lost frequently, puzzle design is unispired, even characterization is lacking. Forget this game and watch the film again.

It was actually a lot of fun to play this and then watch the movie, after which I played it again. It's pretty short but there are multiple ways to solve several of the puzzels, some solutions being better than others, and worth more points than others, which is what determines the score it gives you at the end. At a couple points I did have to refer to a guide, and there is a very long "Diary of Dr. Jones" that came with the original game that you'll need to find a pdf version of to solve the last puzzle.

A great and also somewhat tricky game.
READ THE MANUAL.
Play it, finish it, feel the old school satisfaction.
I liked it back when it was released.

The very first still approved game in my game list and a classic adventure title. RIP Lucasarts.

This is a really convoluted version of the classic film. I lost it about the time that Indy, whilst trying to escape from the catacombs, had to fashion a xylophone out of a man's ribcage to entertain a mouse.

Excellent game. Based on the movie.

Not a bad game but a little frustrating at time. The classic Lucasarts humor is there but the fighting system is just awful, but most fighting can be avoided if you use your head, thankfully. I did end missing out on one of the clues for selecting the correct Grail, so if you play this, you'd better make sure to get both clues and read the manual with the game. Also make sure to practice boxing at the beginning of the game to get used to the fighting system or you'll be in some pain. The game isn't very hard and the puzzles are pretty good, but since this is the budget version of the game, some clues are missing and can ruin the experience. Overall, I'd only recommend this if you have lots of pateince and want more of something like Fate of Atlantis.

Classic adventure game with all the frustrating puzzles, minigames, and pixel-hunting. Honestly, Fate of Atlantis is MILES better than this one.

Not without a walkthrough.

Second place in my rating of best games about "man in the hat". Must buy.

I loved this game as a kid and I love this game now. Works perfectly on Windows 8.1! If you play this game along with other adventure games from LucasArts and say SIerra, you will realize that most of the games now lack any actual thought.

Although it's got a promising start, things quickly turn frustrating a couple of hours in and only get worse as you battle some truly ridiculous controls to progress, only to come up against the same issues in more difficult situations the further in you get. I really, really wanted to enjoy this but I fear it has aged too much for me to recommend it to anyone but the truly hardcore adventure nostalgics out there.