Lionheart: Kings' Crusade Review

07 Oct 2010 at 11:00:42 by Peter Parrish
Systems used to review this title: (PC)

If I've learned anything at all from the harsh battlefields of the 12th Century Holy Land, it's to never leave a man behind in the desert to have his eyes picked out by carrion. For a start that's kind of a grim way to go, but in Lionheart: Kings' Crusade the lesson has practical value. In other strategic wargames you may be used to treating your soldiers like human sausage meat in a tactical grinder. Here, you really need to look after your guys.

Do you remember Dark Omen? I referred to it in my preview of Lionheart, but I'm doing so again because it's a valid comparison and I like repeating myself. Dark Omen was a Games Workshop title from 1998 which was unflinchingly brutal with its tactical battles. If you lost too many chaps in a single fight (where 'too many' often meant 'more than about five'), your chances of progress were pretty much ended. The game didn't really tell you this though, it would just giggle from behind its hand as you attempted to struggle on against increasingly tough odds with an army consisting of two elves with broken ankles. But players quickly got the idea.

Lionheart isn't quite as unforgiving, at least on normal difficulty, but it does capture the same spirit of having to keep the majority of your army intact. The main reason for this is that active units of soldiers will level up pretty rapidly, making them ever more valuable and deadly in battle. If you let too many units perish, recruitment costs will far exceed the rewards you'll be receiving for completing missions. You'll also have to keep recruiting relatively inexperienced troops who will have to begin the levelling up process all over again. Stay in this cycle too long and you'll end up as carrion chow.

The two campaign modes offer alt-history scenarios for both Crusader and Saracen forces (and credit here to Neocore for giving the Saracens a campaign that's just as well-developed as the Crusader one - unlike previous visits to this period like Paradox's Crusader Kings,) where you either have to sweep across the Holy Land to Baghdad (as Richard the Lionheart) or push the Crusaders back from the same city (as Saladin.) Every time a region is taken by your forces, it opens up access to nearby areas. In this way, you'll get a maximum of four or five potential missions to choose from, leaving it up to you to decide which one your current force may be best suited for.

In-between each battle you're given the chance to recruit new forces, top up any losses and beef up the soldiers who've gained enough experience to improve their stats or gain additional skills. It's probably worth mentioning here that anybody hoping for a devastatingly accurate historical portrayal of the Third Crusade is going to be disappointed. While the troop-types seem accurate, Neocore is going for a sort of high-fantasy/mythologised version of events, as seen in their previous game King Arthur. As a result, you can expect to see ancient relics that give you stat boosts and special troop skills that offer temporary speed bursts or feats of strength.

The Crusader campaign has a unique system of four major European backers who will be variously pleased and angered by your Holy Land activities. They offer different battle plans for certain battles and will react to local incidents which periodically pop-up on the campaign map. These incidents present a text scenario (essentially a streamlined version of the text adventure sections in King Arthur) and offer two or three options which will generally balance different consequences and rewards or, occasionally, open up an additional battle. For example, you may be forced to select a regional ruler which will inevitably please one of the powers, but annoy others. As you steadily earn favour with each power, it unlocks bonuses (such as reduced recruitment costs) and new units. The Saracen campaign has a more traditional 'tech-tree,' representing the technological progress that was thriving in the Middle East at the time, offering unlockable bonuses in return for cash and research points.

It would be impossible to completely fill out every single research path, so it pays to plan ahead and aim to win favour with your preferred power. This also offers a certain amount of replay value, as pitching in with (say) The Pope rather than the Knights Templar will present a different route to victory. Likewise, someone who maxes out the unit research route as a Saracen player will have a different experience to one who focuses on other aspects.

All of this provides a lovely RPG-like shell for the heart of the game - the tactical battles. As you'll probably have figured out from the media released for the game, or from previous experience with King Arthur, these play out a little like the battles in the Total War series. As in that series, it's important to take terrain, opponents and other factors like morale into account when launching an attack. Every unit type has a foe that it will perform best against (spearmen can decimate cavalry, cavalry wipe out archers and so on) but also has a preferred terrain type (light infantry can be pretty hopeless in the open, but stand a chance in a swamp or a wood against heavily armoured enemies.) For those who felt that the archers in King Arthur were far too powerful, you'll be pleased to hear that they've been toned down in Lionheart. Morale has gained some useful visual indicators so you'll be able to tell when a unit is wavering, or even spreading panic to others.

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