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Crown Wars: The Black Prince is a turn-based strategy game. After having covered the action genre with an article on Hellblade 2 and the role-playing genre with an article on Dragon’s Dogma 2, we thought it would be interesting to tackle another strategy-based style.

Type	Turn-Based Strategy
Editeur	Nacon
Développeur	Artefacts Studio
Date de sortie	May 23, 2024
Classification	16 years and over

Crown Wars: The Black Prince was developed by Artefacts Studio, a Lyon-based studio familiar with the style, having produced games such as Space Hulk Tactics and The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk.

We’re plunged into the Hundred Years’ War in 1356, just after John II of France’s defeat by the heir to the English crown, the Black Prince. France then sank into chaos, at the mercy of brigands. It’s against this backdrop that you’ll play the descendant of a disgraced family who must fight to win back its holdings. This is especially the case since, just like in Assassin’s Creed, an evil force called the Order is growing and corrupting your enemies.

Crown Wars allows you to manage your Domain and send your Companions on quests to regain control of the situation. You’ll alternate between these two game phases.

At your Domain, you’ll recruit companions and upgrade recruits. So, there’s an RPG aspect to the game in the sense that you’ll customize each of your Companions and upgrade them. They’re each given a default class, which you can then specialize by choosing class skills and weapon skills. In other words, there’s a multitude of possibilities. You’ll also upgrade your buildings, including a chapel for healing the wounded, a prison for guarding your enemies, a forge for upgrading your equipment and a laboratory which supplies you with medical supplies and bombs.

These choices necessarily have an impact on the second game phase, battle. For example, an archer specialized in armor-piercing or a knight specialized in maces will be more effective against the heavily-armed Bretons. On the other hand, a rapid duelist or beast could rush the formidable English archers who might pose a threat to your slow, heavy knights.

The battle takes place on a limited-sized 3-D isometric map. Your squad of four fighters deploys discreetly, and a chess piece on the Map of France indicates their destination. You have control over your camera and can move it everywhere, but a fog of war hides areas which are out of your Companions’ field of vision.

The game is turn-based. In other words, you first choose moves for all of your Companions, then it’s up to the computer to move all of the enemies which are alerted. Each of your companions has three actions per turn: one for movement only, and two for either taking another action or moving again by sprinting. You can alternate the order in which you perform your actions as you like and take one action with one Companion, for example, two with the next, and return to the first Companion now that the path is clear, and so on until you’ve moved everyone you want.

Your actions include attacks or stances depending on your Companions’ abilities. A Companion who has fallen in battle can be healed by spending a period of days in your chapel. Space is limited, so be careful!

The battlefield is made up of squares, like a chessboard. The battle will, therefore, involve analyzing the situation at every turn. Where are the enemies, what are their skills and defenses, and what is the terrain like? Then, you have to choose the best strategy. There are ballistae and scorpios for you to use, quivers to retrieve and obstacles to go around. You keep taking turns until one of the sides wins.

It’s a particular style that requires special skills, including observation, analysis, and time to come up with a strategy. We can already guess, because of the game’s mechanics, that it’s a play style that’ll be problematic on a cognitive level since it requires a lot of deliberation. But what about the other profiles? We were able to carry out a live test, and I’m going to take a closer look at all this in the following article.

What if I have a physical disability?

7 / 10

 

Let’s start by looking at what flexibility Crown Wars offers in terms of manipulating controllers. And it starts badly. In fact, it’s only possible to remap keys on the PC version. It isn’t possible on console.

Fortunately, the game only uses six buttons and the two joysticks during the game phase. This is a good thing, because when there are few keys, it makes the game more accessible when using adapted gear such as adaptive controllers. This saves you the inconvenience of having ten buttons in front of you.

But note that without this material, certain actions use buttons known to be problematic. For example, the button for placing a waypoint is located on the left stick button. It can be used to break up a movement so as to avoid going in a straight line and crossing a burning area, for example. So, the waypoint’s an important action placed on a button that’s often difficult to use. Traveling between enemies and Companions uses the rear keys, buttons and triggers, which are also difficult to reach if you lack motor skills.

So be warned, if you’re used to adapting the game’s controls to your mobility using key remapping, you’ll have to play on PC, not console.

Joystick management is also rather limited. Only the right joystick’s sensitivity, used for the camera, is adjustable over 20 degrees of variation. It’s important for positioning, but the one on the left will be just as important. In fact, the left joystick moves the cursor to select objectives on the map, and it also selects destination squares during battle phases. However, you can’t adjust the left joystick nor inverse joysticks. In the interfaces, you can use directional buttons instead of the joystick to move around.

Beyond these structural limits, the game isn’t very physically demanding thanks to its gameplay. It’s a turn-based game that doesn’t require fast reflexes. What’s more, even if you have a limited number of turns, there isn’t any time limit for completing them. So, in physical terms, it’s all a question of patience as you juggle with the joysticks to select the correct squares. If you play with one hand, for example, you have time to switch from one stick to the other.

Because there are so few actions, Crown Wars uses only single clicks, with no need for combos or series of buttons to use many different actions. There isn’t any button mashing either, which can be exhausting. So, even when it comes to muscle fatigue, you can take a break at any time.

In conclusion, if using triggers or joysticks isn’t a problem for you, the console version will be accessible. In other cases, Crown Wars on PC offers greater flexibility by way of key organization.

What if I’m visually impaired?

4 / 10

From a visual point of view, Crown Wars is going to present different challenges for you. It’s a game of strategy with numerous effects indicated by icons. The viewpoint is from above for a tactical view of the battlefield. So, there’s a lot of information to manage in order to make the right decisions.

However, this information is in the form of icons, and many of the interface elements are a bit small and not easily visible, such as diamonds on the character portraits to the left of the screen. Crown Wars also uses colors that can cause problems in the game interface. Health bars above characters’ heads are red for enemies and green for allies.

So these are quite a few red flags, in our opinion, because small elements mean difficulties in perceiving them. What’s more, red and green are always problematic colors since they directly concern color-blind players.

As a result, we quickly turned our attention to the options to see if we could improve any of this. However, there aren’t any graphics settings other than image quality, and only on PC. Therefore, it isn’t possible to apply a filter or change interface colors.

Fortunately, the game lets you zoom in with the camera from ground level. The view from above is for strategy, but there’s also a view close to the action, so you can select the correct square and find the right direction for a move or action. In the Game Menu, the option “show floating health bars” allows you to transform the colored health bar into a numerical display of current health over maximum health. You can, therefore, activate it to avoid depending on colors for this essential information.

Unfortunately, we can’t rely much on the natural contrast of game interfaces. When you move, a white border indicates the range of your movement, turning yellow if you use an additional action to sprint. Since you can’t change the contrast, this can be a problem for certain terrain. Even a bright yellow line on an earth-colored square hardly stands out. Worse still, for weapons with an area of effect, such as ballistae, you have to select a bright red area of effect over a total range that’s in a lighter red.

In addition, there aren’t any sound cues for essential aspects of the game. There are sound effects for actions, such as shooting or hitting. However, there aren’t any when you exceed the basic travel distance, attain a target or reach the maximum distance. Yet, this is essential information.

You’d think that with a turn-based game and a chessboard-style game map with squares, it would be easy to map movement. I know that my character can advance ten squares, so that equals ten presses on the directional button. However, without any sound when approaching a target or even an interactive object, I don’t know where I’m going.

As for text, its size can’t be adjusted, neither in the menus, interface, nor subtitles. Especially regarding the latter, the font in cutscenes is very small and stylized in a way that isn’t very legible.

However, apart from cutscenes, discussions between NPCs are in white text over a dark background. You can also control conversation speeds since you move from one sentence to another by pressing the X key, so you have plenty of time to read.

In conclusion, all of these shortcomings in terms of color choice, lack of contrast and absence of sound cues mean that Crown Wars will not be playable with very low vision or for blind players. It’ll also be difficult for players with limited eyesight.

 

What if I have hearing loss?

8 / 10

 

We ended the chapter on visual accessibility by discussing subtitles accompanying NPC conversations. This is also an essential point if you have hearing loss. So, we have no control over settings regarding this aspect, however, subtitles are good quality. Having white text on a black background, with the speaker identified by its portrait, and a controlled reading rhythm are all really good points. All that’s missing is ambient information.

However, during cutscenes, the user interface disappears, and the text is stylized and in italics. Speakers are no longer identified. So when several people speak, like during tutorial cutscenes, texts follow each other indiscriminately. This makes the story hard to follow, especially for dyslexic players who will struggle with this font.

Beyond this, the Audio Menu lets you adjust various audio sources. In Crown Wars, conversations are more of an atmospheric than a gameplay element, so you can remove or reduce elements that are less important to you, such as music or voices. On the other hand, you can strengthen ambient and interface sounds that are more useful for this type of game.

Whereas an abundance of visual information might be a problem for visually impaired players, it’s effective to the contrary in compensating for a lack of sound. There aren’t any sound-based game mechanics, so Crown Wars should pose few problems for players with hearing impairments.

What if I have a cognitive disability?

4 / 10

By definition, Crown Wars: The Black Prince is a purely strategic game. So, for each turn of the game, you need to study the situation and choose an overall strategy; for example, “I’ve got around 15 actions in all, three per character under my command. What do I plan to do this turn?”

So you need to understand how all of the actions and skills available to you work and combine them as effectively as possible; for example, “If I attack with the bear first, I’ll get a 20% bonus for my trainer’s attack.” There also isn’t anything in Crown Wars to guide you in knowing what to do next. You’re on your own.

This is especially so since you’re only given a brief explanation during the first battle, which serves as a learning experience. This instructional information is displayed in a small, written aside and is only visible for a few seconds.

While you’re playing, there isn’t any menu to recall these instructions. In the same way, skill effects are displayed above the skill when selected, and it’s often only partial information.

For example, you’re informed that for a certain skill, “attack applies bleeding,” okay…  However, you’re not told what bleeding means, that the enemy will lose life at the beginning of each turn, nor for how many health points. Only after you use the skill do you see a small drop of blood above the health bar of the affected opponent with a number. “Bleed 5?” “Okay, he’s going to lose five points at the beginning of his turn, so since he only has four left, he’s going to die. I don’t need to waste another action to attack him again.”

What’s more, debuffs often have a chance of being applied, but not systematically. A non-reading player will miss all of this!

So, you have to be good at both planning and carrying out your actions at the same time. If you have concentration problems, the turn-by-turn aspect will be a big advantage. You’ll have plenty of time to act and can easily save the game to take a break. Regarding settings, sound management makes it possible to limit overload. The game isn’t too visually saturated, and thankfully so, because you can’t change the interface. Only health bars can be removed if you prefer numerical information.

On the other hand, if you’re more hyperactive like Steven and Joël on the team, and need fast, instinctive action, Crown Wars isn’t for you! It’s a game where you have to break down actions, observe and plan. So it’ll be more difficult for you to manage because it requires a lot of concentration. The team is surely too used to action-adventure games!

Note that the game features animations when an enemy dies, and they can be bloody. You can disable these animations as well as blood if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing. The difficulty mode was patched a day before our test, proof that a game can evolve and improve following its release. We’ve gone from three default game levels, with progressive difficulty settings in battle and game conditions, to a totally custom level. Every feature is adjustable, including battle duration, enemy health and more.

 

What We Think

As Bibi told us during the live session, “It’s an expert game, so beginners start with a small disadvantage.” And indeed, Crown Wars is a game of strategy, so you can expect complexity. But he adds to this the consideration that the average player already knows how this genre usually works.

The Crown Wars test revealed the particularities of a game style that is less often tested: strategy. If we had an inkling from the beginning, we now have the confirmation that this is a difficult game style for players with attention or comprehension deficits due to its complexity and for players with reduced eyesight due to the large amount of visual information. On the other hand, it’s also a less demanding style and, therefore, more accessible from a physical point of view.

Feel free to watch the YouTube video of the test. Please share your experience with us, for it can only help everyone!