Traits aren't set in stone, however. As in previous games based on the Europa Universalis engine, you are regularly confronted with situations that require you to make some choices. Many of these incidents personally involve your character, and you are asked to react to events such as a pretty wench catching your eye or your son riding horses hard through the woods. No matter what you do in these situations, you win and lose. Give in to your passion with the wench and you wind up with a bastard and the lustful trait. Hold back and you might never father an heir at all. Encourage your son's physical activity and his health and fertility scores go up, but so do his chances of illness and developing the reckless personality trait. There are so many events and potential choices to make that you really get the sense of molding a character, much like in a role-playing game.
Each individual's place in history is further cemented with a massive web of familial relationships. In addition to its role as a strategy game, Crusader Kings also functions as a de facto encyclopedia of European feudal dynasties in the Middle Ages. You can open up your king's main screen and then explore all of his formal connections by clicking on icons representing his parents, wife, sons and daughters, vassals, potential successors, and even court hangers-on. These relationships are so broad that you often begin clicking at one end of Europe and soon end up at the other.
Start clicking and it's hard to stop, too, since you are creating your own dynasty as you go. It is absolutely captivating to follow the progress of bastards born from lustful assignations that you permitted as well as the careers of heirs once they assume the throne, and the success of arranged marriages, and so forth. There is more of an earthy tone here than in any of the preceding Europa Universalis-styled games, and as a result gameplay is much more grounded. It reduces the overly formal epic sweep of those earlier titles to a more manageable center that adds a needed touch of soap opera humanity to some of the most momentous events in history.
Still, some problems have been held over. Although this style of epic strategic gaming has never been more approachable, Paradox repeats many old mistakes. A tutorial has once again been ignored and the manual is woefully inadequate at helping newbies get into their first campaign. There are no solo campaign objectives aside from simply surviving long enough to build prestige and a strong family dynasty. Unlike Europa Universalis II, there are no immediate, stated goals on which you can focus while getting comfortable with the immense depth of play, the number of historical personages with which to deal, the daunting main map screen with over a thousand provinces, and so on. It's nice that Paradox encourages an open-ended, almost sandbox style of play, but this philosophy is too extreme, leaving newcomers adrift in an intimidating sea of kings, counts, and courtiers.
Also, multiplayer still isn't what it should be, largely because of the subpar Valkyrienet matching system. Considering the significant number of people out there playing these games against the computer, Paradox should be doing more to develop an online community to play them with other human beings.
This complex map should look familiar to anyone who has played one of the six previous games based on the Europa Universalis engine.
The Europa Universalis engine is also starting to look and feel old. Backward compatibility is nice--especially here, since you can port saved games into Europa Universalis II for a full 800 years of historical gaming goodness--but we've been looking at essentially the same map since the start of 2001. And while it is a clean and attractive map, it would be nice to see the engine finally move into 3D territory. Sound quality remains impressive. The musical score is overly bombastic and somewhat out of place for this era, although at least these martial tunes sound great. Atmospheric audio effects are better than ever. Open up the character screen to get information on the king and his vassals and you're greeted by the sounds of hushed whispers as the courtiers gossip. Have trouble with the plague or malaria and voices calling "Bring out your dead!" swell up ominously.
Nevertheless, Crusader Kings is an impressive addition to the Europa Universalis family. The addition of playable characters adds a welcome human touch that both broadens the historical scope of the game and makes it friendlier to newcomers to the series who want to attach faces and personalities to the names and numbers.
Crusader Kings(PC):
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