The goal is to kill everything but the process is about positioning and use of special abilities to herd and crush enemies. Maps are tight and placement is random so improvisation is required. Once you've levelled up a few times and unlocked a couple of extra mercenary options, the tactical nature of the combat becomes clearer. I should add that I don't have very much experience of fruit machines and am unnerved by flashing lights in my peripheral vision while out sampling the local laughter liquid. The first time you play, and perhaps even the second, third, fourth and fifth time, you might think it's a bit of a fruit machine because your inputs seem to create fairly arbitrary results, most of which result in your own demise. The naming of the difficulty levels aside, Crowntakers is a smart and focused game. It's an extremely difficult task even on the initial 'Easy' setting (and how I wish that setting was called 'Normal' rather than easy, with the unlockable setting being labelled 'Hardcore' or 'Soul-Sapping' - 'Easy' isn't 'Easy' and having to unlock 'Normal' seems immediately patronising and restrictive. I can't even begin to imagine how I'd go about beating the game on that setting. You won't succeed on your first try - you can't - but every level of experience that your hero gains, as well as those for every companion unlocked, carries over to the next attempt.Įventually, if you're patient and dedicated, you'll unlock a difficulty level that scraps this quasi-generational system and allows you to go for a homerun starting from base, with every mercenary set back to level 1. And that's a good thing because Crowntakers is explicitly built around repetition. On repeated playthroughs, you'll have a better idea of the pros and cons of each encounter, but there's enough randomisation to keep things fresh. There are sometimes options in those encounters but they're not particularly challenging - will you search a house or wake its sleeping inhabitants, or choose to dig deeper into a creepy cave rather than bolting for the exit? Pick a direction, or delve into whatever cave or building is by the roadside, and you'll either move onward or trigger a brief encounter, described in text. On the small randomised maps, movement is turn-based, the hero and his entourage pausing whenever they reach a junction or point of interest. Outside of combat, which I'll discuss later, control is as basic as can be. You'll often be fighting with a single unit and it's rare to have more characters in play than you can count on one hand. Rather than sprawling campaigns, multi-tiered city construction and armies containing hundreds of mythological beasties, Crowntakers has a straightforward story of usurpation and vengeance. Like those lightly strategic entities of node-plundering exploration, recruitment and turn-based combat, Crowntakers is a game in which a hero wanders from point to point on a map, increasing in strength and gathering a band of companions. The carcass in question is the bloated form of King's Bounty or one of the more finely crafted Heroes of Might and Magic games.
But on the whole this is good eating, made up of the boiled remnants of a carcass that has been picked over and carefully reduced. It is, on the whole, a delicious, hearty, warming broth, with the occasional unpleasantly stale crouton thrown into the mix.
Manage cookie settingsĬrowntakers is a broth. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. It's a clever game, though not without its frustrations. "Roguelike turn-based strategy meets RPG", says the Steam page, "alternative equipment.hexagonal battlefields." Behind all of that is a game that strips down almost every aspect of its design to present something half-way between a solo boardgame and a coffee break take on Heroes of Might and Magic. A brief description of Crowntakers reads like an exercise in box-ticking.
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