The Kings’ Crusade - New Name, Still Unplayable For Me

Neocore has dropped Lionheart from the title and are now just calling it The Kings’ Crusade. They’ve also announced two new expansion that add new campaigns. The first, Arabian Nights, arriving on February, will focus on the Saracens and the second expansion, Teutonic Knights, adds the Teutonic Order I supposed. No ETA on the second expansion. I wrote about the demo for the Kings’ Crusade here and it was pretty much unplayable for me(and for many other people based on complaints on their forums) and constantly crashes at the end of the first mission. I’ve had the opportunity to play the full retail version fully patched(there is just one patch) now and sadly it is still unplayable.



I was quite surprised to read Mr Troy Goodfellows(proprietor of Flash of Steel) review over at Gameshark which was pretty positive about the game. He seemed to enjoy the RTS like battles which I found to be flat out shallow and unsatisfying. I did appreciate the fact that the battles or sieges escalated, you took one objective after another before finally sieging the enemy city, but the battles were never that interesting. These are not tactical battles like in the Total War games but very more arcadish RTS experience.

I sort of preferred what Neocore did in King Arthur due to the fact you had access to these cool magic spells that could turn the tide of battle(even if the game was wildly imbalanced, killer archers anyone?). Kings’ Crusades totally strips what made the battles interesting in the first place and added to depth to battles(other than the multi stage sieges which were really just a pain in the butt at times).

They had some good ideas with the multiple factions that had a vested interest in the crusade but ultimately, there was no real diplomacy between them. It was just about picking option A or B or C, with no real drawbacks. Anyway a review of The Kings’ Crusade won’t be forthcoming due to it still being unplayable for me. I do hope they manage to patch this out so that I could give the game with the expansion a spin, but I’m not really pinning my hope on it.