
You can hover over every difficult word in the game (and trust me, there’s a lot of them) to receive a terse explanation of what it means. Here’s a game that actually respects new players with a dynamic tutorial and tooltips galore. Which is why I’m so surprised at how much I’m enjoying Crusader Kings III. I was eventually peer pressured into playing Crusader Kings II, but after 10 or so hours its stoic systems and uninspired art style put my brain into Safe Mode, and I had to go to my fainting chair. I am not one of their kin – my serotonin-starved brain needs to be seduced by stimuli, so my strategy game experience had only extended to more user-friendly titles like Civilization and XCOM, nothing more. They’re usually history boffins who prefer games with spreadsheet complexity over engaging visual aesthetics or fluid gameplay.
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The last game in the series came out in 2012 and many of those who tout its excellence have spent hundreds, often thousands of hours over the past eight years building and destroying dynasties in it. This is because they have a reputation for being obtuse, and often require heaps of contextual research in order to truly understand their importance.
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Both serve the user with granular, rewarding narratives full of intrigue, but summoning the strength to tackle them in the first place can be tricky. Playing a grand strategy game like Crusader Kings III is a lot like reading a thick, revered historical novel. Sprawling anecdotes like that of the doomed dynasty above will be familiar to any veteran Crusader Kings player, but such detailed storytelling is most likely alien, or perhaps surprising to players unfamiliar with the genre. This unexpected parenting lesson served me a sobering mug of stone-cold reality and helped me acclimate to the captivating complexity that underpins Crusader Kings III. Who could blame them for such dishonourable behaviour? They were simply copying their deadbeat dad. My game started to unravel like a bad episode of Game Of Thrones. All of my neglected children hated each other, but they were united in delight to see their meal ticket of a father kick the bucket. Soon, my empire was reduced from Ireland to Dublin, and I received notification of several factions keen to unseat Lorcan, with the most powerful cabals fronted by his many siblings. So my heir apparent, Lorcan, devoid of his father’s famous facial hair, sat in the seat of power with all the confidence and tact of an unexpected fart. When I was prompted to navigate their frequent yet petty childhood squabbles, I’d rush through them in annoyance, seeing their development as a distracting hurdle in my path to power. Butin doing so, I hadn’t given much thought to the education of my busy brood. You see, I’d spent most of my life courting and conquering Earls, sucker punching them with sway before hitting them with the haymaker of deception. What’s worse is that the title I’d worked my whole life to build was now passed to the runt of my large litter. Despite theorising that I would have many comfortable years of collecting taxes and stacking levies in my future, the lack of conventional medicine meant that old age took me mere months after my ascension to the throne. Yet, as I turned the game speed up to its fastest notch and tabbed out for a spot of doom scrolling, I was hit almost instantly with a humbling notification: I was dead, and my reign was over. I did lose my wife to leprosy, but I had married my eldest daughter to the King Of England! For every cloud, there’s a silver lining.Ĭrusader Kings III. I’d just formed the Kingdom Of Ireland after years of attrition, and though I sent many of my children to fight and die for the title as knights, I still had many heirs and was ready to settle into my role as a royal and preserve my precious dynasty. In my first playthrough of the latest instalment of Paradox Interactive’s famously Daedalian grand strategy series, I’d extended beyond the tutorial as green as the hills of Munster in which I was based, fumbling my way into a surprising position of power.


If there’s anything you take from this review, I hope it’s that you never neglect your children when you’re playing Crusader Kings III.
