Wednesday 25 April 2012

Crusader Kings II Review


Crusader Kings II is all the fun of feudal politics, scheming and power-grabbing, from the relative safety of a Grand Strategy game.

I’ll admit I was sceptical about reviewing this one. Before Crusader Kings II I had never shown any interest at all in Grand Strategy, the closest I’ve got is games like the Total War series and civilisation, and they tend to lean towards strategy in the more traditional elements of commanding your troops on the field. I’ve always liked to fight my own battles, either from afar or on the ground, rather than watch numbers tick over.

But too much time spent reading A Song of Ice and Fire and watching Game of Thrones and I started getting the urge to stab some backs and plot some misdeeds. And Paradox Interactive’s Crusader Kings II is really the best place for a budding Tywin Lannister to start their conniving.

Unlike most strategy games where you’ll play as a country, in Crusader Kings 2 you’ll play as a Feudal House, and Paradox have really done their homework with this title. Major characters and houses like William the Conqueror or House Plantagenet have Wikipedia links built into the game, so anyone can look up the lives and histories of their character or house, but a lot of the fun in Crusader Kings 2 comes from picking a minor house and building yourself up from a single province or county.

My lack of experience with feudal politicking and Grand Strategy shined through the first time I successfully attempted playing, the first time proper being ended with my utter confusion at what the interface did, which I’m well aware every Grand Strategy player will deride me for. I picked the aged Morcar of Northumberland, just after the Norman invasion succeeded, a good way of keeping games varied in Crusader Kings is to pick different dates when you start a game, and realised that I was well into middle age and unmarried, with no children. This was not a good start.

Realising that my line would be succeeded by my rebellious younger brother and his son, I quickly set out to marry as high as I possibly could. I combed far and wide for an unmarried woman attached to a house where the ruler would accept my proposal, obviously she would have no choice in the matter, Crusader Kings II laughs at the modern ideas of equality, it really is medieval to the bone, and realised there was an eligible bachelorette in the Royal Family of Germany. Without thinking to examine who this woman was, I arranged the marriage as quickly as possible, a German princess for a wife would make me a powerful man indeed, I thought.

My plans came apart quickly enough, I realised I had not married a German princess, but instead, the Queen Mother. And she was nearly a decade older than I was. Unable to see how much danger this put me in, the game ends when your line dies out, I thought that at least she would be fertile, for a while, at least, and that I could get an heir in her quickly enough. Not the case. God forbid that the characters in Crusader Kings II do anything at your pace, but I was content to wait, and foolishly decided that my brother, at this time rebelling against the Crown, something I was not keen on doing, knowing well from my history books what William the Bastard did with rebels, I threw my lot in with him. Frankly still sour about the Harrying of the North after just under a millennium. The North remembers.

I was particularly keen to bring my brother’s counties into my own hands, sadly punishing my brother and rewarding me for my loyalty did not seem to be in William’s agenda.  My brother was imprisoned, and soon died due to the poor conditions of life in a dungeon. Foolishly, my next target was his son, and because of one assassin I paid, I sealed my own fate. Of course, the assassin did his business with the strictest professionalism, my nephew was dead and his lands were now mine. And no-one was any the wiser of my grievous crime. But years had passed and now I had no heir. This continued to be the case, through thick and thin, sickness and health, I just wasn’t able to get the missus pregnant, let alone have a good, healthy son, and when I died, that was it, my House was done for, forever doomed to a footnote in history.

So far, at least, my other games have turned out better. And the unpredictability of Crusader Kings II really does give it an edge that will make you come back to it again and again. Gameplay can certainly be seen as complicated by someone as inexperienced in the genre as I, but I’m sure someone used to games on this scale will find it a lot easier to grasp than I did. Graphics and aesthetics are an odd complaint to level at this genre, but I have one big one. They could have been handled so much better to get you into the feeling of the game. What we see now is a rendered satellite image style map of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, with small characters representing armies or your personal council about their business tower over whichever county they’re in, and none of this really makes you feel like a feudal lord. The bordering of a table at the edge of the map, which then simply dips into an endless grey void doesn’t help matters. If Paradox hadn’t wanted us to look beyond the edge of the map, there’s a very simple way to do this: Don’t let us. A grey void is a horrific way to do this, it takes us out of whatever immersion we had built up, and if we’re going to pretend it’s on a table, why a rendered style map? Why not one similar to the first Medieval: Total War? We could have had the feeling of looking over a pencilled map or sculpted table in a war room, small wooden pieces moving around it to show tactical developments.

None of this distracts overall from the game, however, which is better than ever thanks to the inclusion of a character creator DLC, where the player can create their customised character right down to portrait, house, position and traits, though adding too many traits will age your character a ridiculous amount, as such it’s best to start low and see what sort of hand the game deals you, which can be annoying when it’s meant to be your character, especially at the rate it ages you.

Other complaints are pettier than this, the music for example, it’s good, but it blares at you at a ridiculous volume, forcing you to turn it way down if you don’t want it distracting you throughout gameplay.

The art, as well, is good and captures the setting well, which is good, because you’ll spend a long time looking at it, and I mean a long time. My computer is not bad by any means, I can run most modern games on any setting I like, but Crusader Kings II takes forever to load, and that’s for people with better processors than me as well. I understand that this can’t be helped; it’s a result of the sheer amount of calculations that make a game on this scale possible. All over the virtual world, there are decisions and plots being put through their paces, battles and full scale crusades. All of this is calculated in real time, and the only edge the player has is the ability to pause to make their decisions, which isn’t much when you’re up against a perfect machine being, which knows Pi to a thousand places.

The depth in this game is really worth mentioning, because I’ve never played anything like it, it’s hard to sum up really, everything is seamless, but there’s a lot you can do, and things have far reaching consequences, different traits can give you different advantages or disadvantages depending on how you choose to play, and games can pan out differently depending on how certain characters like you, all of this can work for better or worse.

The game is one of those last vestiges of difficulty and intrigue in a world filled with games that, in some sad cases, literally play themselves. I’d say fans of Grand Strategy should pick it up, but I don’t doubt that almost all of them probably have. Gamers who love G.R.R Martin’s books and HBO’s series based on them might want to give this a try, and strategy fans like myself who would have previously dismissed Grand Strategy should really think twice before passing a game like Crusader King’s 2.

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