Crown Wars: The Black Prince Review (PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, GeForce Now, & PC)

Set against the backdrop of the 100 Years’ War between France and England in the 14th–15th century, Crown Wars: The Black Prince echoes a familiarity to games you’ve likely played before. Games more likely in the turn-based strategy genre determined to bring forth a medieval struggle for survival. Yet, Crown Wars: The Black Prince puts a unique twist on the relatively commonplace setting, introducing occult dark fantasy themes in an effort to leave a lasting impression on you. The question is, does it succeed? And more so, does the gameplay stick with you enough to warrant repeated playthroughs? Let’s find these out and more in our Crown Wars: The Black Prince review.

Feudal Lord, Arise

War-stricken France amid the 14th–15th century 100 Years’ War sets the stage for your next 10 to 15 hours of playtime with Crown Wars: The Black Prince. It takes you to the years between 1356 and 1360, a time when resources were limited and havoc ran through the lands. When King John II is captured by the Black Prince, son of King Edward of England, France succumbs to further instability. To help restore peace and order, you take on the role of a French lord, commanding an army of soldiers to battle. 

Around the same time, a secret organization called the Order rises up against you, seeking to destroy your kingdom and reap the rewards of the ongoing war. So, not only are you rebuilding a kingdom in shambles, but you are also taking on an occult tribe. On the latter, Crown Wars: The Black Prince leans on dark fantasy, tossing in alchemists who brew poison and soldier bears you can command, among other fictional flavors. 

It’s not that the attempts at knitting a fictional story into a well-known conflict aren’t appreciated. In fact, it’s a commendable effort to stand out from the ton of other games set against the backdrop of the 100 Years’ War. However, the execution of the story leaves a lot to be desired. The premise sounds exciting, raising your expectations of a compelling saga to come. By the mid- and late stages of the game, you can’t help but feel disappointed.

Shoddy Job

From the voice acting to the dialogue, Crown Wars: The Black Prince struggles to achieve a compelling story. The voice acting tries at the narrator bits before falling flat on its face in the character voiceovers. Something about it doesn’t feel authentic, from the ingenuine tone at moments you expect to hear sadness or fear in a character’s voice to downright generic delivery. 

Factor in the uninteresting dialogue that, at times, feels AI-scripted, and you can’t help but persevere. While on the subject, characters can certainly look much better than their presently blocky and expressionless faces. The environment, as well, is a letdown, with very minimal detailing to bring out varying terrain and low texture to pop off of the screen. 

It’s a shame because a turn-based strategy game can make good use of elevation and obstacles in skirmishes. Environmental features can play into your strategy, and Crown Prince: The Black Prince neglecting to use it to its advantage slashes off a layer of tactical play that’s hard to ignore the more you play. As for the soundtrack, it’s not bad, but it isn’t great either. It’s mostly generic and fills in the silent sections of the game, just well enough to get the job done.

Hands Dirty

You can often forgive shoddy storytelling if the gameplay is exciting enough to save face. Fortunately, Crown Wars: The Black Prince does more than a couple of things to entice you. For starters, you can choose between four factions, each offering varying strengths and weaknesses. You’ll find some factions have an additional unique class, offer rare consumables, and more. You can also customize your emblem, so that’s neat. 

Digging deeper into content variety, Crown Wars: The Black Prince offers six playable class types, including Alchemist, Flayer, Gunner, Beastmaster, and more. My personal favorite is the beastmaster, who can summon an animal, including a vicious bear, to fight on your behalf. 

Each class has a diverse set of skills and abilities that add extra spice to the gameplay. These determine which class to use for certain scenarios, like archers atop watch towers to fire long-range arrows at invaders. Furthermore, you can customize characters’ names and appearances, albeit the latter has lackluster visuals.

Back to Base

For your base of operations, you have an entire castle all to yourself. You can build it too, progressively the more you play, as you like, with light-base building elements that don’t ask too much of you. You’ll recruit new soldiers from your castle, equip them with new skills and abilities, and train them for more demanding missions. To meet your needs, you’ll need to upgrade different sections of your castle. You’ll have a blacksmith room, for example, where you forge new weapons and gear, a chapel where soldiers recuperate, and more. 

The core gameplay loop revolves around alternating the main and side quests. However, with the difficulty spike in most turn-based strategy games, you may want to clear up side quests first to level up. Side quests vary, as do missions, from escorting precious cargo to base to the brutal main missions of defending your castle against swarms of enemies. At the start, you have four classes with relatively low-level skills and abilities. The more missions you send them out on, the more rewards you earn in the way of upgrades to your base skills, gear, and even unlocking new classes. 

Side quests aren’t typically too heavy to bear. Often, you’ll send your soldiers out on procedurally generated missions, and they’ll return bearing gifts. However, missions based too far from the castle can lead to your soldiers spending too much time away from the castle, where you’ll want them to spend the most time training and recuperating. Eventually, soldiers will succumb to too much damage that causes permanent death, and it can hurt you badly, especially when you spend the time upgrading them. 

Trade-Offs

It’s in the trade-offs you make that Crown Wars: The Black Prince shines. You’re often weighing risk against reward. Should you send out your soldiers to take up damage or allow them time to train and recuperate? Should you take on more side quests, or are you confident taking on the more brutal main missions? While the main missions feel all over the place,. They hardly build on the overall story. Still, they can take their toll on you, especially when you leave them unprepared. 

In combat, it’s quite similar to XCOM. You can perform one movement and two attacks per turn. You can also use up your attacks to move further. Battles are brisk, so you can come up with some pretty neat combos. The AI enemy, however, is inconsistent. It can feel overpowering. Other times, it is nonsensical. Eventually, enemies become generic, with predictable play. By then, despite the class variety, a repeated playthrough can feel far-fetched.

Technically, Crown Wars: The Black Prince suffers from minor hiccups here and there that, combined, can hamper your experience. Camera angles can be inconsistent, especially when exploring enemy positions. Frame rates can drop from time to time. Some players have reported crashes, though, fortunately, the auto-save feature works perfectly well. 

Verdict

Crown Wars: The Black Prince gets some things right. In the same vein, it gets other things wrong. The question is, are the pros strong enough to justify taking it on? Well, on the one hand, you have a neat gameplay loop that pushes you to take on side quests to level up. Once you feel confident in your soldiers’ abilities, weapons, and gear, you can take them to the more brutal main missions against the Order. You have a diverse enough range of classes to keep gameplay interesting. You can come up with some pretty neat combos that feel rewarding to pull off. 

And, well, the praises stop there, because, on the other hand, you have an uninteresting story. From the dialogue to the voice acting, Crown Prince: The Black Prince feels lacking in authenticity and intrigue. The visuals, which in this day and age, should be soaring above the clouds, have low textures and detail. Environments are dull, and characters aren’t inviting. The soundtrack is average, with sound effects that get the job done. The castle light building is intriguing, I’ll say. You put thought into the sections to upgrade and are involved in the day-to-day operations at your base.

However, the more you go out into battle, the more the cracks in the gameplay become too vast to ignore. Enemy AI could use more ingenuity. The camera angles are inconsistent when exploring enemy positions. Overall, the main missions begin to blend into one another, with often the same attack response from enemy factions. It’s difficult to justify another go at Crown Wars: The Black Prince. For the first run, though, veterans may be better placed to dive in.