Death Crown

‎Personally I am a big fan of RTS, sagas like Age of Empires or Total War are fixed in my library and I play them continuously. At first, I was a little skeptical of Death Crown's proposal, but I was very wrong, as it's a ‎‎title that all real-time strategy lovers‎‎should try at least once, because of its addictive and frantic gameplay.‎

Death Crown does not innovate in the visual department and that is not a negative point. The retro "1-bit" art gives this experience a unique charm that uses the fundamentals of real-time strategy very well while challenging the player in slightly elaborate and fierce matches.

While this strategy game does a great job at creating a unique look, the gameplay doesn't really do enough to hold your attention. It's pretty simplistic and won't take long for you to master which unfortunately means that it ends up feeling fairly repetitive. It's a shame as when the game does introduce new mechanics in the boss fights things can get pretty interesting but there just aren't enough of these types of battles.

I'd love to encourage more developers to leverage 1-bit aesthetics. The high contrast and level of detail that can be worked into the art, using modern technology, makes for a distinctive and highly appealing art direction. However, it's still got to be playable. A fast-paced strategy game that is almost impossible to follow because everything is so tiny on the screen, coupled with high levels of contrast that end up encouraging eye strain, is just not on. Death Crown would be brilliant on PC, where you can see everything that's going on (I imagine). This lazy and ill-conceived port to the Nintendo Switch is almost worthless, sadly.

There's no doubt that the Switch, in general, is pretty starved for decent real-time strategy games...