While exploring demos that were available during the Next Feast on Steam this one ended up catching my eye with the turn-based combat campaign. You can also upgrade armor and weapons while doing other things from your kingdom while you send out parties to retake towns for rewards.
The bulk of the demo was ordering my units one at a time around a map to complete objectives. As you further advance you spot more enemies in other parts of the town or other areas you are pushing forward in.
This game also provides what feels like a natural environment for players to take cover behind something. Maybe you are inside a castle and have some boxes to use as possible cover for a range-based class.
I also found it interesting things in the environment could be stood on as well. You might have some lumber in the marketplace that you are doing combat on. A caster or ranged class could take a higher position up on those pieces of lumber.
Allowing you to use the environment in such a way makes you spend a moment thinking about where the best place to move your units is next. There are also other considerations such as the area of effect of certain attacks and so forth.
While I think this feature would get boring after a while. Early on I enjoyed there being a death cutscene tossed in on most of my kills. Later, as I progressed further along, I noticed this was less prevalent but still occurred sometimes.
There is just something about the game taking a moment to highlight such an event that adds a bit of fun to the action. It's rather cool when it occurs on a hard-to-take-down unit on the battlefield. This is where I feel taking that extra ten seconds to display the finishing blow should be saved for that special occasion.
The game allows some customization of things like your coat of arms. You are after all starting your kingdom on a small piece of land that was given to you. I won’t go into the exact storyline details of why you found yourself in such a position in the first place.
Since I was just playing the demo of the game I had limited exposure to many things like building features. The further you progress along in the main story campaign the more buildings and other things you unlock.
One thing I ended up unlocking was the blacksmith. With the resources you gain from capturing other towns, you get rewarded with a time one reward for doing so.
You then could spend those resources and wait a couple of in-game days to upgrade a weapon to have more damage and accuracy. This was perhaps an area of the game I should have put more thought into before spending all my resources.
Each one of the units you control has multiple different weapons. They rarely share the same type as well. So, spending resources on upgrading the dagger for instance only had a positive impact on one of my units. Early on might not have been the best place to spend my limited resources if I was no longer using that unit as often as others.
I ended up finding out the hard way when some of my units went down during my first battle once I got to my castle. I did not realize at the time you needed to progress further along in the campaign before unlocking the building units could be placed in to rest up. Therefore, I had upgraded weapons to units I could no longer use in battle since they got taken out in combat but were not yet dead.
I then had to send my best to the next battle in a town that took nine days for them to reach. This one was a bit harder and had a few different rooms you had to clear. The spaces were sometimes a lot tighter.
Where I realized that some of my other units would have been better suited for this one. While you would think it would not be an issue. Since I could not heal my downed unit's failure, I ended up taking out even more of the remaining units I had.
This also brought up the importance of understanding the different skills each unit has. I had one unit that could remove armor points of anything it attacked. That would have been quite useful in the second place I was attacking. Since I delt with many enemy units that had two or three points of armor. Making things like my ranged units damage a joke.
It would have been nice if I could have taken more units along with me. I did work out since some of the units come with pets. That is kind of a way to get another unit in since pets like bears and dogs are moved independently of their owner.
This is one of those games where I think storytelling and the cuteness would be something I would not skip like I do on most games. While this game does not have the best graphics. They were more than visually interesting enough for me to want to watch each of them at least once.
The only issues I ran into other than not being able to heal downed units early on when you don’t have that building yet unlocked. The camera would sometimes lock up on a certain section of the battleground. That would be easy to fix just by clicking on a different unit to unlock the camera. Other than that, for a demo and early testing of the game things seemed to have gone quite smoothly.
Final Thoughts
This is one of those I might consider picking up after it is released at some point and seeing what more it has to offer. This game did not feel underwhelming in the amount of stuff you needed to understand. It is, however, one of those types of games that will take a while to master in unit positioning and knowing what units to take and the exact situations you would want to use skills that have cooldowns on.
Other Content
Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Crown Wars: The Black Prince.
Disclosure: This is based on the demo that was available during the February Next Fest event in 2024.
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STOPI love those steam specials but don’t take advantage of them as much as I should. I have been hooked on multiplayer games for decades and just don’t single player anymore. Shame because those are some of the most playable and fun games.
Our gaming crew has picked up some very fun interim games for free on steam, epic and amazing prime gaming over the years.
Do you ever play the multiplayer games? Would be great to connect for one of those and collaborate on reviews for Hive!
I was missing out the events a lot as well. It seems Steam has gone full blown demo testing mode for games. I great way for them to try stand out vs what other platforms are doing.
As far as MP games not so much anymore. If I do it tends to be solo. Close friends of mine consider themselves lucky if they get to game with me 2 or 3 times a year now a days. Attempts where made with 7days to die, Valheim and some others.
The issue is any spare time I have is for content. Which makes my game time for content rather scheduled. So I might play a game for 20-60 hours over a single week and then it could be 2 months before I return to that game if at all.
Issues also arises in the past when say everyone tries to make time for 8 PM for 4 hours. If someone can’t show or is quite late/has to leave early it crates issues in trying to keep everyone at the same level while also trying to maintain the pace I need for my content scheduled for that particular game.
This then usually ends up with me making multiple characters. One I play for content purpose and one I play with a group. I tend to not have the spare time to do that so it creates other issues for me in trying to do so.
I’ve also had issues in the past where I’ll be playing on a private server with some people. People vote to run a different game on that server instead. Which leaves me left with an unfinished series.
Then there are moments like now where I’m struggle so hard for time I’m blowing though all the content I had made in advance. Along with replying to comments only once or twice a week when I can find the time late at night.
Hopefully in the future I’ll have more time again and I can find a solution to being able to play with others again at some point. Right now I’m barley keeping things going as it is.
Interesting game, I like games like this.
It's been cool we get to demo many diffrent games now before they release.