eil of Crows is an interesting concept of Mount and Blade Total
War medieval (or Warhammer Fantasty), but it all happens in real time. Like Total Warhammer you have a singular hero
unit (that's you) but unlike Total Warhammer there is an element of RPG to it. You
create your own character and give it a background which changes your gear and
wealth (i.e. starting difficulty). It's not just about empire building either
as you can raid and pillage growing your coffers and gang. Or pay off villages
to join you or adventure around and take quests from them such as rescuing
prisoners or taking bounties. The core gameplay is polished to a standard. The
character animations are well done and combat feels like medieval chaos as it
should. But everything else around it feels incomplete. art, assets and UI in
particular. It's missing some quality of life features and it can feel aimless
and difficult to find where you need to go. The first time I was given a quest
I spent 10 minutes looking for the location before I found it hidden behind a
tree. There could be a list of towns that when clicked on takes you to the
location or something in the quest that does it.
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RPG and character creation in a grand RPG is a great idea.
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Same goes for combat. I zoomed out (which is faster than in
for some reason) and then I lost my troops. It was literally impossible to see
them from that difference and no way to double click them so the camera could
snap to them. The minimap isn’t very good. When I fled the battlefield my
character lost all her levels and XP… how does that make sense? This lead me to
be taken to their bandit camp. Pretty cool except the roaming bandits on
horseback attacked me, resulting in an infinite loop I couldn’t escape because
they were faster, thus breaking the game. On top of this there's no politics UI
- so you can't see which factions are waring with each other (only yourself).
Not ideal for a game all about warring factions. But even the systems around it
feel like a lot of lost potential with not a lot of variety in factions and
units beyond basic axeman, swordsman, spearman, bows, siege weapons, etc. It’s
clear the game is very unfinished.
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| Game trapped me in an infinite loop near the Deserters Camp. Would be cool if I was forced to join? |
RPG options are bare bones – with 10 emblems, colours, etc.
You get male and female with half a dozen hair choices. You can barely
customize your faction beyond this as you’re forever stuck with a blue shield
despite your primary faction colour. Why this didn’t change to match your
tabard beats me… Something that I feel would have truly made this game
exceptional is to go all in on the RPG elements as this is would makes this
game unique. Not only in-depth layered RPG mechanics for your hero but your
faction. Also implement a text-adventure style random event generator. Like
Wasteland as you move around you would come across different encounters such as
bandits about to steal from a travelling wagon. Do you help, intervene, or
avoid? This would colour your character and give each story a unique context. There’s
already a similar system with roaming factions and towns – but it feels
barebones with options such as pay off, join, or kill. Characters don’t respond
to you and don’t feel alive and as a result the world doesn’t too. It’d also
help solve the issue of feeling aimless when you start. Just head in a
direction and see what happens! If you do well enough you’ll gather some gold
and can build your army from there. Perhaps the events dynamically change to
the size of your “power” level. So kingdoms with 1000s of men would have
different events. If events were varied enough you could spend the entire game
as a band of 20 or so adventurers. That would make this game truly shine. I
wanted to be a bastard woman wandering alone slowly growing her own adventuring
warband; helping local towns slay bandits before eventually assimilating with a
town (and building a kingdom) or more interesting a town of bandits (and
continuing her bastardry). Sadly, the game was for the most part abandoned as
the developer could not commit to developing it full-time. What we’re left with
is an abandoned, unfinished game full of lost potential. Even so I find it weird
that this game is still going on sale. 60% off $15 RRP for an ongoing project
shows us how much Steam can fail as a free market of saturated and unfinished experiences.
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