Crown Wars: The Black Prince

Bears can do a lot of cool things, but they can't carry a story without a cohesive narrative or make bland management more interesting.

Crown Wars: The Black Prince, a turn-based RPG set during the Hundred Years' War, offers a fairly satisfying dose of fun for players who enjoy this genre. The core of the game—including its mechanics, combat, and castle management—works well. Unfortunately, the title is let down by technical shortcomings that disrupt the smooth gameplay and can sometimes be truly frustrating.

Crown Wars: The Black Prince is a competent tactical RPG that fits squarely within the confines of its chosen genre, so if you want more X-COM-likes in your life, and don’t mind feeling like you’d get the same experience playing any number of other, similar games, you could do worse than checking it out.

Crown Wars: The Black Prince is a very tedious tactic that can only be recommended as an effective sleeping pill.

Ultimately, the battles in Crown Wars: The Black Prince end up being extremely long, somewhat dull, and worrisome due to some of the issues described above. It’s not necessarily a bad game and the gameplay loop can be interesting if you stick to it, but it lacks polish and fine-tuning, resulting in a flawed offering that will quickly make fans of the genre start looking elsewhere for better alternatives.

Crown Wars has a good core concept that combines castle management with combat missions from historical France. However, the gameplay itself is quite incomplete, it seems primitive, and instead of fine-tuning it, the developers unnecessarily focused on violent scenes.

Crown Wars: The Black Prince features an intriguing medieval setting and turn-based tactical gameplay with significant potential. The various classes and unique abilities add depth, and the concept of a castle as a central hub is a logical choice with plenty of possibilities. Unfortunately, the experience is hindered by clunky graphics and animations, mediocre voice-overs, and an artificially high difficulty level. Balance issues and excessive use of timers make the game more tiring and frustrating than challenging and enjoyable. Overall, the game currently feels more like a mobile game port than a fully-fledged tactical RPG.

I understand why the developers set Crown Wars: The Black Prince during the Hundred Years War. It’s a compelling era of European history and you inherently want to play it. It got me playing a game I otherwise would have glossed over because of the promise of its theme. The problem is that once you have someone’s attention this way, you need to deliver on what you’ve promised them. Crown Wars doesn’t quite get there and fails to fill the void with something memorable.

Crown Wars: The Black Prince is a decent game that is let down by a variety of reasons. While the story, visuals and audio are all, at best, mediocre, the strong gameplay loop where combat directly feeds into the management mechanics is an excellent way to flex your tactical prowess.

At its core, Crown Wars: The Black Prince is an exciting strategy game, especially after you've invested a few hours of gameplay in expanding your domain and upgrading your troops. The more tactical options we got, the more fun we had, also thanks to the fast pace of the battles. However, the game still gets in its own way too often in the current version. Especially the camera is suboptimal in the fights and the fun of the skirmishes sometimes fluctuates due to the sometimes too stupid AI. The biggest fun killer, however, turned out to be the technical quirks that really wore on our nerves.