Crown Wars: The Black Prince review - Rewriting history with a dark twist

Crown Wars: The Black Prince, developed by Artefacts Studio and published by Nacon, is a demanding turn-based tactics and strategy game set in a dark fantasy medieval world. When you enter this world of chaos, you will be tasked with restoring the peace. From your castle, the seat of all your operations and stronghold, you will recruit, equip and train your soldiers to take on your enemies. Once your foes have been bested in battle, you will obtain precious resources to aid advance your cause.

Form your squad accordingly and use the unique skills or attributes of your soldiers to fight your adversaries and ultimately foil the diabolical plot threatening your kingdom.

With all that said, here is my hands-on experience with Crown Wars: The Black Prince.

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Crown Wars: The Black Prince - History rewritten in a dark fantasy setting

Crown Wars: The Black Prince immerses players in the 100-Years War, which pits several royal families against each other in bloody conflicts. The outcome will determine who dons the crown of the most powerful kingdom in the West. But as always, things are never as simple as they seem.

To top things off, amidst all the war and chaos is a powerful force of evil at large, capable of changing history itself. A secret, malevolent organization – the Order – is sowing chaos across the kingdom in its quest for power. This is where you come in and take hold of the reins of history.

First impressions and gameplay

After the initial tutorial (which teaches you the combat basics) and a bit of storytelling (that helps you understand more about this world), you are given command of your own castle. From here, you will recruit, train, equip, forge, plan, craft, heal, and send your forces into combat. You will even be able to imprison enemies, but that comes later on.

Let's start breaking down the core elements of the castle.

Laboratory

The Laboratory allows you craft, brew, and create weapons and items that will give your troops an edge in battle. Is your unit poisoned? No problem. Gulp down some Antidote potion and get them back on their feet.

Need to slowly chip away at a large group of enemies? Why not toss a Poison Grenade at them? At times, I found myself letting the status affect the work rather than risk the lives of my men and women.

You can also buy supplies here in case you need them in a jiffy.

Chapel

The Chapel is essentially the place where your units will rest and recuperate should they fall in battle. I've been lucky on this front since I haven't yet had a unit fall, but I have come very close to having that happen.

Market

Use the Marget to buy goods you need (Image via Artefacts Studio/Crown Wars: The Black Prince)

The Market is a quintessential building in your castle as it allows you to buy resources using Gold. This is one of the four major resources, which also includes Metal, Leather, and Wood. When you fall short of one, use Gold to replenish them.

Great Hall

History at a glance (Image via Artefacts Studio/Crown Wars: The Black Prince)

The Great Hall is essentially the building from which you can access the backstory and cutscenes. Here, you can change the banner of your house and pay homage to your fallen units.

The Codex can also be accessed from the Great Hall.

Forge

The Forge, to me, was the beating heart of my castle. As soon as I had a surplus of resources, I had to upgrade both the weapons and armor of my units. While it may seem needless at the start of the game, as things progress, the added protection will make a lot of difference.

Being able to score critical hits and deal more damage will make combat much quicker as well - very useful for missions that are timed.

Barracks

In-depth information about units (Image via Artefacts Studio/Crown Wars: The Black Prince)

The Barracks is the go-to place to recruit, train, and equip your domain's champions. At first, it can get a bit overwhelming and confusing, but once I understood the five classes and how they function individually and when paired together, combat got a lot easier.

The five classes are:

Alchemist (Ranged unit that can use potions and concoctions with extreme proficiency)
Beastmaster (Ranged or melee units that fights alongside their beast companion)
Crusader (Heavily armored unit that fights using a weapon and shield or two-handed weapon)
Duelist (Armored unit that can fight using one weapon and shield or dual weapons)
Flayer (Ranged unit, but can also use melee weapons and a shield if needed)

Prison

The Prison is a rather unique building within your castle that allows you to capture and keep prisoners of war. You could random them off at the cost of Gold, but keeping them has its perks.

Each enemy unit captured and held provides direct perks to certain units. In theory, this can be used to bolster one type of unit and make them incredibly strong.

Map of France

Overview map of the mainland (Image via Artefacts Studio/Crown Wars: The Black Prince)

The Map of France is your overview panel that allows you to look at an overmap at a glance. From here, you select your fights and send your companions in battle. It also gives you information about other factions and in-depth details about the battle you are about to fight.

Coming back to the gameplay, itself, there are a few things that I really enjoyed. For starters, learning how to use units and their skills is pretty straightforward. It can take a few tries to understand certain nuances, such as hit-chance and critical rates, but overall, those diving into the TBS genre will not find it hard to adjust.

However, I must admit that even on the easiest of difficulties, the gameplay could get a bit challenging for newer players to adjust to. Manually saving the game before going into battle is probably for the best. Trial and error will be needed in some instances. A good example is figuring out how to use siege weapons located on the map.

Strategy and execution (Image via Artefacts Studio/Crown Wars: The Black Prince)

Granted the mechanic is very simple, but I'll admit it took me a while to realize just how simple it is.

However, when you learn to use fixed weapons to your advantage, you can take out a group of enemies without much effort. Same with concoctions, potions, and certain unit skills.

Use fixtures to deal with enemy units (Image via Artefacts Studio/Crown Wars: The Black Prince)

There are amazing AOE-based skills and items that can change how you fight opponents. Rather than singling them out, you can simply damage the entire lot and let status effects do their job. While most of these items and skills can only be used once per fight, they are worth using.

Circling back to units, learning how to use them in combination has been perhaps the only slow learning curve there is. Given that each is unique in how it functions, knowing their stats will make all the difference during gameplay. However, from my experience, playing aggressively has been by far the best possible way to get the upper hand.

Performance and sound

Crown Wars: The Black Prince, provided by Nacon, was played on a system having the following configuration:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
GPU: RTX 3070 8GB
RAM: 32 GB

Throughout my Crown Wars: The Black Prince playthrough, I encountered no issues as such. There was a bit of lag at times but nothing that slowed down the overall experience. The game did hard-crash once, but it was probably an anomaly at best. In general, the game ran smoothly, and everything worked as intended.

In terms of sounds, the satisfying background score and screams of the enemy units as they get smacked on the face by a mace or war hammer are indeed enjoyable to hear. The voice overs are pretty good as well.

In Conclusion

Mace to the fact must work (Image via Artefacts Studio/Crown Wars: The Black Prince)

Crown Wars: The Black Prince is a solid fantasy take on the 100-Years War and is rather fully-fleshed out TBS experience. It gives you the ability to equip and train an army as you see fit; there are no wrong answers.

Perhaps my only gripe regarding the game stems from the fact that certain units seem hard to kill despite having upgraded my own. This, when tied into the fact that there are numerous foes in every mission to face off against with limited potions and special abilities, it sometimes seems impossible to pull off a win without nearly losing your entire army and having them sit out for days at a time.

When this happens, you are left with newer recruits that would likely perish if sent into difficult settings. While there are easier missions to send them on, it always helps having a veteran with them, but that is not always possible as they are out of action.

Another design issue per se is the fact that you need to fight your way to extraction points.

Enemies spawn right next to them. Given that taking out a squad of units takes more than two turns, it's impossible to extract in most instances without engaging in another fight. It can get rather frustrating, given that you've just managed to take out the key target and want to escape without taking any more damage.

Escape is not always possible (Image via Artefacts Studio/Crown Wars: The Black Prince)

Other than this minor setback, the game is pretty solid when it comes to core mechanics and features. Everything works the way it's supposed to.

I'm sure with just a bit of balancing, things will be perfect. When taking into account the storyline that slowly unfolds as you progress, it's a slow but enjoyable grind to uncover everything.