Like most gamers, I am a huge fan of the isometric strategy games where you lead squads or armies in tactical combat from a top-down perspective. Afterall, everyone knows that if you throw an XCOM or Fire Emblem game at players like me with similar tastes, their weekend will pretty much be gone. As such, as soon as I learned about Crown Wars: The Black Prince, I had to play it as it sounded like an XCOM-like title set in medieval times.
Specifically, Crown Wars takes place during the Hundred Years’ War, which was the intermittent struggle between England and France during the 14th and 15th centuries. It’s not a genre that gets too much attention in gaming. To add even more spice to the setting, Crown Wars adds a bit of an occult twist when it comes to the plot, so it’s a pretty amazing setting to get things going.
There is a pretty good tutorial mission to help new players learn the mechanics. For the most part, it’s really good in that respect. Lots of titles fall short in their tutorial section, but developer Artefacts Studio does a great job of explaining how everything works. In terms of combat, it’s a bit like the excellent Wartales. However, where you go out questing and exploring the world in Wartales, in Crown Wars you mostly stick to your home base and then go out on missions when required. There is even a large base-building mechanic.
Having enjoyed the tutorial, I quickly picked the Beastmaster as my favorite class to play. All of the classes seemed pretty balanced. Between the excellent tutorial, the balanced classes, and the heavy emphasis on base building, I was pretty much ready to dive into Crown Wars: The Black Prince and give it my stamp of approval.
Unfortunately, this is when the wheels came off for Crown Wars. When I first started playing it when it released, it was horribly unbalanced compared to most every other turn-based fighting game I have played. People complained about this on the Steam forums, and it looked like the developers were listening. However, even after several patches, the core issues with Crown Wars have not been fixed, and I figured that I could not wait any longer to send in the review.
So, in terms of balance, which is the core issue with it, let me explain. There is a fine line between a turn-based strategy title being challenging versus having the odds really unfairly stacked against you from the beginning. There is something to be said for overcoming a challenge in a title like this, but in Crown Wars it’s completely unbalanced to the point where even skilled players will hit a wall. For example, XCOM is challenging. Your units can usually hold their own if you plan right, and sometimes you have to take tactical risks.
Crown Wars missed that memo completely. Three missions into it, and I was facing roughly twenty enemies to my four characters. Yes, I have faced similar odds in XCOM and other games in this genre. The issue, however, with Crown Wars is that even with being able to attack twice per unit, I had to spend all of the turns for all four of my units to kill a single enemy. Then I was attacked by the other 19 left on the board. And this was happening on normal difficulty. Someone should have caught this bad imbalance in play testing. Or at the very least, it should have been fixed in post-release patches.
As I was getting ready to submit this review, there was a hot patch released to rebalance the difficulty. Because I really wanted to give Crown Wars a chance, I went back and started playing all over again. But sadly, I barely noticed any difference in the combat difficulty. Maybe I was doing slightly more damage, but even so the combat was asymmetrical ad absurdum.
Seeing how Crown Wars struggles with balance really makes you appreciate the crack team at Firaxis Games (developer of the XCOM series) and how they have mastered the difficulty curve for their combats. As for Crown Wars, anyone new to the genre should stay away. Then again, while I am not the Dwight D. Eisenhower of turn-based strategy games, I have played them extensively and still did not have a good time with Crown Wars because of its badly unbalanced difficulty.
I really can’t recommend Crown Wars: The Black Prince. There was so much potential, but most players are going to be locked out from enjoying it. If you really want to attempt a challenging title that’s even to the point of being unfair, then you might give this one a try. But there are so many well balanced and fun turn-based strategy titles out there to enjoy these days that it’s hard to justify struggling through Crown Wars: The Black Prince.