Knights of the Crusades
Last updated: 2025-09-08
- Engaging and deep gameplay experience
- Promising early access development
- Unique blend of RTS mechanics
- Frequent and severe game crashes
- Numerous bugs and lack of polish
- Performance degradation post-updates
Emotions
Players are highly satisfied with the game's unique blend of RTS and other genres, its engaging and challenging gameplay, and its immersive qualities like graphics, music, and voice acting. The game's ability to fulfill a nostalgic desire for RTS games, coupled with active developer improvements and a clean interface, also contributes significantly to player enjoyment.
The primary cause of frustration stems from frequent and severe technical issues, including numerous bugs, crashes to desktop, and game freezes, which often render the game unplayable. Players also express frustration with outdated gameplay mechanics and performance issues like lagging.
Disappointment arises from the game's unfulfilled potential, largely due to persistent bugs, crashes, and performance deterioration. Players also cite poor UI/UX, slow gameplay, limited content, and a lack of significant changes from predecessors as reasons for their disappointment.
Players are excited by the game's ability to fulfill a long-awaited niche, its immersive soundtrack, voice-overs, and depth, particularly the amazing siege mechanics. There is also significant anticipation for future developments and the game's potential to evolve.
Enjoyment is driven by the game's overall immersive experience, engaging gameplay mechanics, and strategic fun. Players particularly enjoy the mix of genres, the nostalgic feel, and the fulfillment of a medieval RTS craving.
Verdict
Mixed
Summary
Positive 71% · Negative 29%. Score: 29 / 100
Positives:
- Players find the game highly enjoyable, immersive, and strategically deep, offering many hours of fun. It's praised for its solid foundations, balanced gameplay, and the ability to lose track of time while playing.
- Despite being an indie and early access title, the game is considered polished and well-put-together, with significant potential for future growth. Players appreciate the frequent updates and the developers' commitment.
- The game successfully combines elements of grand strategy, city-building, and real-time tactical combat, reminiscent of classic RTS titles like Age of Empires, Total War, and Civilization. This blend offers a fresh and modern twist on the genre.
- The game excels in recreating a medieval atmosphere, particularly the Knights Templar and Crusades setting. Players appreciate the historical accuracy, immersive details, and the epic feeling of leading a crusade.
- Reviewers consistently praise the game's immersive soundtrack, great music, and excellent voice acting, which significantly enhance the story and overall mood. The graphics and art direction are also noted as pleasing and sufficient for immersion.
Negatives:
- Players report constant game crashes, often occurring hourly, mid-battle, after battles, or when transitioning between world and town maps. These stability issues make the game frustrating and, for some, unplayable, preventing progress.
- The game is plagued by a multitude of bugs, described as 'janky' and 'buggy as hell'. Issues include freezing, soft locks requiring Alt+F4, and specific quest bugs like capturing villages not counting. This indicates a significant lack of polish.
- Several players noted that game stability, graphic performance, and campaign scripting worsened after updates. This includes FPS drops during map scrolling and script freezes leading to crashes.
- The narration's voice acting is described as odd, stilted, and artificial, with some comparing it to AI-generated speech. This detracts from the game's immersion.
- The game defaults to maximum screen size, causing display issues, and the 'save as' feature could be improved. There are also minimal untranslated phrases in the Russian construction menu.
Gameplay:
- The game offers a unique blend of real-time strategy, city-building, and grand strategy elements, drawing comparisons to titles like Total War and Crusader Kings. Players manage territories, engage in diplomacy, develop economies, and participate in real-time tactical combat.
- The city-building system is simple and visually engaging, allowing players to construct various building types (City, Production, Faith) and upgrade them. However, the system is considered 'lite' and can become repetitive, with some players questioning the need for micro-management in RTS mode when world map options exist.
- Combat involves moving armies, positioning troops before engagements, and managing a 15-minute defense timer. However, the battle interface needs improvement, and tactics are often limited to simple charges, making battles feel like 'hack and slash' encounters.
- Players begin as blackguard mercenaries, focusing on plundering or capturing settlements for survival and long-term production. Resources like wood, silver, and stone are obtained by building structures and assigning peasants, with additional resources from raiding and quests.
- The game requires players to invest time to understand its mechanics, as some aspects are not immediately clear. The tutorial could be improved to better explain concepts like resource storage and passive income between the world map and towns.
Performance:
- Players are experiencing game crashes, with some reporting multiple occurrences within short playtimes or at specific in-game events like winning Nicea or defending Antioch. While some crashes have reportedly been fixed, the issue persists for others.
- The game exhibits poor performance on certain graphics cards, specifically noted with an RTX 3070. However, other players report no lag due to GPU usage on an RTX 4070, suggesting potential optimization issues or hardware-specific problems.
- Players generally report no performance issues related to CPU or memory usage, indicating that these components are not typically bottlenecks for the game's performance.
Recommendations:
- Many players recommend the game, finding it enjoyable and worth their time, especially after initial fixes. It's seen as a solid choice for fans of its genre and the studio's previous work.
- Some players experienced significant technical issues, including crashes, which made the game unplayable for them. While some issues have been addressed, ongoing polish is desired.
- The game strongly appeals to fans of historical strategy, medieval themes, and grand strategy games. Players who enjoy managing armies, conquering lands, and tactical depth will find it particularly engaging.
- A specific suggestion was made to improve the building interface and font display, indicating these elements detract from the user experience and could be easily enhanced.
Miscellaneous:
- The community notes that developers are highly active and responsive to player feedback, which is a strong positive indicator for the game's future development.
- Several clusters contain very limited or non-actionable feedback, such as purchase history, review dates, or external links. While included for completeness, these points offer minimal insight into game quality.
- Players recognize the game as a low-budget indie passion project with a very accessible price point, suggesting good value for money.
