Paradox has a lot of games about fighting or managing empires or the thrilling world of economics (I will NEVER stop stanning for Victoria, you hear me, Paradox?!), but the Crusader Kings series has always been about…imagine my Dom Toretto voice…family. Crusader Kings III is about…FAMILY…and may be Paradox’s best game.
Crusader Kings III
Developer: Paradox Interactive
Price: $50 USD
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with Steam code for review
A little background: Instead of France or Germany or, well, a nation-state, in the Crusader Kings series you play a noble. You have a family and relatives and a chunk of land you nominally control, but it’s not that simple. From launch, you have a web of relatives and alliances and ancestral claims and obligations and all of them will come into play. As a result, this isn’t a game about winning a war or getting the most stuff. It’s about keeping your…family…line growing through the centuries, grooming them into powerful lords and ladies, and murdering everyone who gets in the way. Sometimes, that means murdering other family members. Or babies. I LOVE murdering babies.
Even something as seemingly simple as a war on your neighbor is a complicated affair. You need to rally your armies and knights, but you may want to marshal your allies, see who THEIR allies are, see if you can afford it, see if you have a good reason to go to war, see if you can actually beat them, and see…wait, maybe there’s a better way to do this. Maybe instead of fighting their heroic general, you can have them murdered and make a baby the new ruler of that land. Then maybe you can marry that pain in the ass son of yours TO that baby and then when they die, maybe YOUR descendant can rule that land. It’s almost TOO easy.
Think of Crusader Kings III as a bunch of plates constantly spinning. Your job is to run between them, keeping them spinning. Sometimes you steal another guy’s spinning plate. But you’re always twirling, twirling, twirling towards greatness! It’s about managing your…FAMILY…but also making sure your heirs are married off or that you’re married and making heirs or at least you’re cheating and making heirs and there’s also those underlings to keep happy and you also want to keep your religion happy or maybe you want a new religion and you know what I am KING if I want some SELF-CARE TIME like a FEAST then BY ODIN WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A FEAST IN THIS KINGDOM.
The appeal isn’t really the gameplay, though this is probably the best game Paradox has produced in terms of being comprehensible to the human mind. It’s a medieval Europe (and surrounding areas) story generation engine. It’s a roleplaying game where you make choices for one idiot noble. Or a smart noble! But probably an idiot.
The fun is taking a random Duchy or minor kingdom and seeing what happens. It’s about uniting Ireland or swearing as Germany breaks up. It’s about your heir dying and winding up as an obscure cousin on the other end of the map. It’s telling those stories to your friends because strategy gaming makes you tons of really cool friends. It’s maybe the most open Paradox game I’ve ever played. You can get involved in regional hellwars that consume the continent…or you can just chill in some out of the way place and marry off all your relatives. You can build a vast empire…or just chill and see what happens.
While there is a lot to do, the lack of a win condition means there’s seldom anything you must do. Excepting wars, which may require active intervention or ordering troops around, most of the time you can chill and watch things happen and do whatever you like. I tend to pass the time finding obscure relatives and courtiers to marry off in the hopes that one day it will pay off. Maybe sandbox is the wrong word. Maybe fishtank. You watch and enjoy it and kind of relax. Only sometimes you give the fish knives and make them fight for you.
Where this differs from many Paradox games is it actually has a tutorial and the tutorial is actually useful for teaching you to play the game, so it’s less about browsing for Wikis and forum threads with walkthroughs for playing an obscure country and slowly bumbling your way into competency. While Paradox games have a well-earned reputation for being overwhelmingly complex, the thing about Crusader Kings 3 is it’s…surprisingly chill. It’s actually kind of mellow if things aren’t currently going off the rails. The tutorial scenario gives you a small county in Ireland to play with and I know several people that continued after the tutorial portion was done, just chilling and poking around the Emerald Isle.
There are some minor annoyances. Enemy armies tend to go tromping off to attack your realm even when you’re sieging something valuable of theirs. Sometimes you’ll have armies forming a daisy chain of pursuits. It gets silly. It’s also funny when a tiny force lays siege to your heavily armed city and can’t do anything rather than going to help out. Still, weirder things have happened.
While I’m not sure it’s fair to award points based on things that haven’t happened yet, Paradox tends to support flagship games like this with DLC releases and mod support, and the community is probably already making mods for whatever your dream “hell kingdom simulation” could be.
I’ve followed Paradox since Europa Universalis was a beta they burned onto a CD when I was a wee baby game writer, so it’s been a lot of fun to watch them grow. Crusader Kings 3 feels like the game they’ve been trying to make all along, and they finally figured out how to do it.
The Final Word
This may be Paradox’s best game and it’s about…family.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
