The Hundred Years’ War is a fascinating subject for history buffs, though more of us may be more familiar with Game of Thrones or A Song of Ice and Fire, which draw heavily from portions of that time period. There have been video game attempts at capturing the deep, twisting intrigue of the Hundred Years’ War or Game of Thrones, but a successful RPG in that vein is elusive. A sweeping epic video game adaptation of either is still an enticing prospect, and an XCOM-like would have so much potential to deliver the glory of leading a great house to triumph through battle and espionage. If you were looking at Crown Wars: The Black Prince, which touts itself as taking place on the French side during the Hundred Years’ War, to deliver on any of that potential, then it’s best to keep looking because it doesn’t achieve that satisfactorily.
The setting of Crown Wars instantly drums up intrigue. In the prologue, a Knights Templar-ish group tries to elude capture as the walls are closing in around them. With a small band of militants, you luckily flee from the city. You’re the head of one of France’s great houses; however, to once again become a player in this grand game, you must start again from the bottom. Crown Wars drops you into Europe in the 1300s when Britain was covertly making efforts to conquer France from within. Though multiple factions have a stake in how this plays out, they’re more like the proxies of wealthy benefactors, each trying to carve out their own piece of the country, muddying the waters to the point that no one’s certain who or why they’re even fighting. You are one of those benefactors, though you have an inkling of a purpose: staying in the game and helping to return peace to France by fighting off dark, underground influences that threaten to sink it. It’s an enticing premise, but the way it progresses is the poison leading Crown Wars to a slow, torturous death.
Unfortunately, the narrative is so disjointed that it’s difficult to anchor yourself to any aspect, at least not until far too late for it to matter. The chief problem is that you’re never given a proper introduction to any characters or factions, so there’s little to hook you or even provide proper bearings. You follow a string of story missions, with hints of threads drawing everything together. There’s the expectation to feel the weight of purportedly important characters’ appearances, yet there’s so little setup or follow-up that nothing has much meaning unless, perhaps, you’re well-read on the time period. But who keeps a history textbook handy? Characters, with a lone exception, don’t stick around long anyway, so there’s little permanence to it all. The main antagonist doesn’t impactfully emerge until near the end of the game. You get to choose a house to build from several slightly differing options, but you don’t even have an avatar, so there’s little tethering you to this world narratively.
Being an XCOM-like, it’s expected that organic stories should arise through a run of Crown Wars, and it does alright on that front. I came to develop a reliance on Willibert, the bear whisperer (more on the bears later) when I needed an important job done. It was a heavy moment when I finally lost my alchemist, as the experience he was bringing to every battle would take a substantial amount of time to replace. On the other hand, it seemed as though Crown Wars expected me to be drawn into the melodrama of contending with other factions for power and resources as they became corrupted, requiring me to exorcise them. Though you fight them for resources in a too-literal sense, it’s more mindless grinding than intrigue in practice.
Combat isn’t bad, and there are even points where it impresses, though those moments are fleeting. It’s a standard setup for an XCOM-style grid-based game with a few wrinkles. For instance, each character gets three actions (as opposed to the standard two). There are six classes that fundamentally handle differently, but there are a couple of variants to each. To add to the variety, each weapon has a unique set of attacks, so there’s room to explore and synergies to find if you’re willing to experiment. Mostly, the differences between equipment are deceptively slighter than they first appear, and it doesn’t take long to figure out how to use them optimally. Obviously, melee units play differently from ranged ones, but there’s little to distinguish one melee class from another. Though you need to take care to set up combos you may plan for your troops, the tactical decisions you make are usually straightforward, and as you spend most of your time in battle, it gets old quickly. Unique weapons with their own attacks, environmental weapons such as trebuchets, and varied mission types help to add excitement to the combat system, but Crown Wars fed me small morsels at a time when I wanted a hearty meal.
The strategic layer is where Crown Wars is at its worst, and it kills the experience. As I alluded to earlier, all there is to do between story missions is grind by fighting with other factions in battles with little meaning besides collecting resources. It might have added some weight if the other factions had established identities or if there were any other consequences to those battles beyond possibly losing units if you’re defeated in the skirmish. I still have no idea who the Navarres or the Bretons are, what their role in this conflict was, or why I was repeatedly fighting them.
You’re also tasked with building your castle, but it is, indeed, a dull and laborious task. You can upgrade every aspect of your keep, but, again, in a heavily linear fashion. To advance to the end, you need to improve everything that’s vital, which is easy to identify, though many options are seemingly without purpose. XCOM games present a fascinating mystery as you collect alien specimens and items that yield new upgrades and equipment, but your progression is limited to what you discover, giving you the feeling of being a ragtag resistance group scraping and clawing at whatever you can find to get by.
Though Crown Wars attempts to emulate that experience in a different setting, your only limitation is resources, which you primarily gain through battle, and the upgrades generally all require the same resources. It’s a monotonous cycle of fight, upgrade, fight, upgrade, and while the story missions are better, the generic ones tend to feel samey. If you aren’t careful in building out your army, losing a unit to permadeath can put your plans on hold even longer while you train up someone else. You determine the order of progression, but that isn’t a series of branching, personal choices so much as a long series of marginal improvements with the important ones being inevitable if you want to get to the end. Too much of a good thing is a real concept, but this is too much of an average thing.
If it sounds like I’m saying Crown Wars is all bad, well, I can’t overlook my favorite part of the experience: bears. Fighting with bears is as awesome as you’d expect. The beastmaster unit comes with either a dog or a bear, and though the dog is also great, it’s not every day that you get to control a bear in battle. The beastmaster is the most interesting class to play, emphasizing synergy between master and beast, meaning you ideally want to work them into situations where they team up for attacks. Between watching the bears shift from their normal all-fours stance to standing upright for attacks, putting bears on overwatch, having bears awkwardly hunker down into a defensive pose, seeing bears goofily bound up stairs, taking bears on assassination missions, and hearing my crusader yelling “repent!” at enemy bears, the animals are an endless form of amusement. The brutal, execution-style finishing animations are a fine reward for efficiently taking down an enemy, but watching the bear maul its prey is way cooler than all the others. Had the game instead been titled “Bear Wars: The Black Bear,” it would have at least highlighted its biggest success.
I can’t deny that Crown Wars is a good-looking game, as maps are littered with environmental storytelling bits, from bodies strewn about suggesting the well-worn landscape of battle to the colors of nature changing with the seasons. The weather effects are particularly impressive, as fog hangs in the air on a chilly day and rain appears to pool on the ground. Characters are a mixed result because they appear to be a couple of video game generations old, though strategy games often have those limitations. The fluffy bears look pretty realistic, however.
I also can’t knock the music; Crown Wars has picked some impressive, varied pieces that don’t break the mold but do go beyond the typical cliches of medieval music in games. The voice acting is another story, however. It would have been helpful to remind actors of the time period and that they should stick to British or French accents. While those are in the mix (sometimes on the wrong side of the conflict), too many American accents made their way into the stew as well. You have the standard Midwest, but a few from modern-day Brooklyn somehow wound up in France also. The most surprising, however, was hearing an enthusiastic Southern drawl. Settling on accents for a period setting where English wouldn’t be the primary language is always awkward, but some consistency would be best.
Perhaps it was unfair of me to pile high expectations on top of Crown Wars. Still, aside from the bears, there’s little to recommend here on the game’s own merits. Great strategy RPGs aren’t hard to come by these days, but it’s generally a time-consuming subgenre, and Crown Wars comes across worse in their shadow. Bearing that in mind, even if you’ve exhausted all other options, you may be better off firing up another run of XCOM, Jagged Alliance, or Fire Emblem.
