Crusader Kings 3 review - Rock Paper Shotgun

The way I’d summarise Crusader Kings 3 depends heavily on where you’re coming at the game from.

If you never played Crusader Kings 2, but were always interested, then I heartily recommend this extremely long, in-depth strategy/RPG hybrid about managing the successive lives of a dynasty of medieval problem people.

It’s less overwrought than its predecessor, and certainly less mentally draining to play.

But this felt more like the result of smart design choices than oversimplification.

All in all, and as boring as it is to say, I think Crusader Kings 3 is a lot like Crusader Kings 2, but newer and tidier.

The HRE is about as massive and complex as anything gets in the world of CK3, so it seemed like my best bet for testing how various systems performed at scale.

I saw all of the things I would expect to see, and in general, I found the ‘core’ CK3 experience alone gives you more to do than CK2 did at launch.

There’s the 867 AD start date, for literal starters, plus the dynasty mechanic (which I talked about a lot, along with other new features, in my preview), the skill-tree-growing lifestyle system, borrowed and augmented from CK2’s Way Of Life DLC, and of course customisable faiths, plus a long list of smaller new features.

I guess the point I’m making is that, while there’s obviously not as much in it as there was in CK2 after 15 expansions, you’d have a hard time calling CK3 sparse?

My second playthrough, for example (which I’m saving for a diary), featured an Estonian clan obsessed with breeding a horde of well-read, horny giants. But there’s room for more, clearly. Will Paradox release more mechanics and systems as paid-for DLC? Of course. Does that mean the game isn’t “complete” on launch? I don’t think so at all..

A big and pleasant surprise was war. I never truly enjoyed combat in CK2, and often played peacefully for the sake of laziness, grudgingly mustering levies for wars of expansion when I’d run out of other grand plans. But all the fiddliness is gone, now. Getting all the lads together for a rampage involves so much less clicking than it used to, and you can have your full hordes muster anywhere you like by setting a rally point, which I enjoy the convenience of. Navies have been binned, but that’s good riddance as far as I’m concerned, again for convenience’s sake..

There are now also types of unit – pole lads, horse lads, etc. – which add a little RTS-style rock-paper-scissors flavour to army clashes, and are implemented sensibly. Any ruler in CK3 has their levies, which are just masses of bog standard fight men provided by domain holdings and vassal contributions. And then they have their men-at-arms, who are sort of like the ruler’s personal army. Satisfyingly, you can even start batteries of siege weapons as men-at-arms regiments, drastically shortening sieges at the cost of not being much use in a field battle. There are also knights, of course, who are characters from the game’s roster of thousands of simulated murderers, and who will actually fight battles embedded in your armies, as well as doing the usual NPC business..

All of this adds more tactical depth to campaigning, and because of the reduction in micromanagement I spent less war-time micromanoeuvring my armies, and had more time to think carefully about things like river crossings, terrain types, unit counters and embedded characters. After a few extremely successful campaigns, however, I began to wonder whether my triumphs were entirely down to having more mental room for tactical thinking. Was I just suddenly much better at war in Crusader Kings 3? I found that hard to believe, so I started to really pay attention to AI troop moves, and began to notice some odd decisions..

There’s an argument that this was just, y’know, me doing strategy in a strategy game. But then, I executed many successful variations on it in different crises, all founded on the fact that the AI seemed to 1) ignore any armies not actively besieging something, like a Jurassic Park T-Rex but with vision based on trebuchets, and 2) react to any siege by immediately rushing every available soldier directly to the fight, leaving none in reserve elsewhere.

I do love the dynasty mechanic, which invests your progress in the development of a family legacy that persists (complete with perks) through the deaths of successive rulers, as much as I had suspected I would.

Whatever happens to you individually, you’ll still be playing the dynasty game – there will still be bonuses that apply to you, and the aforementioned arsehole cousin will still at least be working towards the same broad goal as you.

It is more succinctly explained in CK3, with a wealth of tooltips and UI navigation aids, But it’s still not what you’d call simple.

And besides, given the sheer amount of critical information you need to access in a game of CK3, it’s a wonder that so much of it is exactly where you want it to be at any given time.

The redesign of CK2’s UI was always going to be a nightmarish brief, but it’s been tackled admirably, and on the whole the new layout is both intuitive and pleasant to look at (which it needs to be, given that you spend way more time in menu windows than you do actually looking at the pretty new 3D map).

One annoying, surely fixable issue is the notification banners about trivial things that appear at the top of the screen, over windows that you’re trying to interact with, and that can’t be dismissed with a ‘close’ button.

Waiting for them to fade on their own doesn’t take long, but when you’re doing tons of marriage admin and the like, it can get annoying.

I noticed more of them when playing my Estonian run – perhaps because I was more familiar with the game by then, and perhaps because I imagine a lot of core systems were built with the commonly-played nations (like the HRE) in mind.

In which case, it’s no surprise that edge cases involving Baltic giantfuckers will run into more wrinkles in the game’s fabric.

But to be fair, it was on the main screen rather than the character info window, and I managed to miss it for a long, long time?

There are so many more little good things about Crusader Kings 3 that I’d like to talk about?

Because if this game came out of nowhere, with nothing like it having graced the PC before, I would be speechless at its ingenuity.

But of course, Crusader Kings 2 has been gracing our PCs, for eight years now, and it’s a bloody hard act to follow (you have to realise just how hard it is not to swerve into a concluding metaphor about royal succession here. Rest assured, I’m not going to do it)

In truth, there was no way that Crusader Kings 3 was ever going to live up to what every different camp of CK2 fans wanted from a sequel

And in all honesty, how can you make a sequel to a game which – even though it was a sequel itself – is widely acknowledged as having been a true one-of-a-kind

But it would have been a damn solid game all the same, with the potential to eclipse its source material in time

In fact, thinking about it, I just described Crusader Kings 3

Tagged with feature, paradox development studios, Paradox Interactive, review, wot i think, Crusader Kings III

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