CRUSADER KINGS III
Fraser Brown: Crusader Kings III is this year’s best strategy game, but it’s also one of the greatest RPGs and sandboxy sims around as well. On the surface, it’s not much of a departure from its predecessor, but this is a game with astounding ambition that couldn’t have happened without eight years of Crusader Kings II. It refines and reconfigures so much that, while at a glance it’s familiar, it’s far from a repeat.
It’s been made knowing that the audience for this sort of thing is surprisingly large and broad, something Paradox probably wasn’t that sure of last time, and that means it’s also the studio’s most accessible grand strategy behemoth. It remains endlessly complex, but the abundance of nested tooltips and all the different ways it guides you, subtly and overtly, makes it a lot more palatable, even if it’s still a bit on the intimidating side.
Let it get its hooks in you, and you’ll have something that will keep you engaged for the foreseeable future. If you fancy a quiet life managing some smallholdings in West Africa, you can take that break, or you take some Vikings to Asia, start a generation-spanning war, and establish a controversial new religion where you eat people. Whether you dream big or small, it’s really about the members of your court. Jealous knights, torture-obsessed spouses, kids who keep getting lost in the woods and eaten by bears—you’ll have to keep your eye on them all. They’re maddening and wonderful, and I’m really sorry I keep assassinating them.
Rick Lane: I knew I would love Crusader Kings III when I discovered that there, is a House Lane. With the motto of ‘We Choose Violence’, House Lane comprises a single woman named Debbie, who is both a lunatic and a nymphomaniac. Ascribed to no court and with no other family, she exists as an island in the game’s aristocratic ocean.
Once I learned this, I knew I had to elevate House Lane from a horny madwoman living as a hermit into a global medieval power. Self-imposed mission accepted, I
THE MOST ACCESSIBLE GRAND STRATEGY BEHEMOTH
married Debbie off to an Irish Duke under a matrilineal marriage, gave her offspring land of their own, then switched over to her eldest son when he came of age. Now King Brian Lane rules all of Ireland, which extends across the Irish Sea, engulfing large parts of Scotland and northern England (or, as it’s known, the Danelaw).
This is the beauty of Crusader Kings III. It lets you spin your own narrative tangent, coming up with ridiculous ‘what if’ scenarios and watching the consequences ripple across hundreds of years of history.
A game that lets you become pope is interesting enough. A game that lets you marry, kill, then eat the pope is something else entirely.