NeocoreGames won. With their very first game, Crusaders: Thy Kingdom Come, they managed to convince Paradox (their publisher) that their dream project, King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame, could work. Long story short – Neocore was working on that epic-scale mix between tactical strategy and an RPG, but Paradox wasn't sure about the RPG aspect and wanted a pure strategy game. Neocore agreed to that (Crusaders was pretty much yet another Braveheart / Total War variant), but also threw in some elements they wanted to see in King Arthur as a proof of concept. It worked.

I mean, sure, Crusaders: Thy Kingdom Come was anything but perfect and, like I said, in many ways it was a proof-of-concept thing (Paradox only gave Neocore a year to finish it, while our guys worked with their own in-house engine), but still, despite all the troubles, Crusaders succeed and only a few months later King Arthur (development of which actually started before the Crusaders) finally landed. Was it perfect? Not really, no. Was it a groundbreaking success? Still no. But it was a thing. And now, the world was Neocore's oyster. Paradox was ready to pay for a sequel. But guess what? They were also satisfied with Crusaders and wanted more of that, too. Which... placed Neocore in a rather strange position.

Think about it. They simplified much more complicated/advanced game in order to make Crusaders and now, after they finally managed to release that advanced game they always wanted to make, they needed to simplify it again. In a nutshell? That's pretty much all you need to know about The King's Crusade. It's a direct sequel to Crusaders with pretty much all the improvements from King Arthur.

Don't let the King Arthur name fool you, though. Like I said, what we have here is 100% Crusaders. Neither of those RPG things was added. What I'm trying to say is that we've got things like better speed options (always a good thing in my book, since I totally can't stand real-time battles being slow), new resources, advanced strategic planning, etc. Optional quests that used to give us reputation were also redesigned into something more akin to King Arthur's faith system (basically, your actions determine which faction will provide you with its support). We also got the proper Risk-like “grand strategy” map that Crusaders had only the hints of.

My favorite new feature, though, is the second faction. That's right; we're not forced to play as Christians anymore. We can now become Saracen and kick some infidel butt. Which is even more interesting than you might think, since the Saracens come with their own “reputation” system, which is drastically different from what the Christians have. In other words, we've got not one but two proper campaigns with two drastically different factions. Love that. Actually, you know what? I totally did enjoy my time with this game. Does it mean that it's good, though? Well... it's not bad. I can give it that. Yet there are two serious problems with it.

First, there's DLC. I mean, of course there's DLC; it's Paradox we're talking about. But it's not like we are talking 'bout the expansions here. Complicated additions that introduce brand-new mechanics that heavily alter gameplay—all that isn't about this game. What we have in The King's Crusade is that certain kind of DLC that makes you feel it was supposed to be in the game to begin with but was removed in order to be sold separately. Like, you know. The new units. Which isn't really a deal-breaking problem when it's about juggernauts like the Total War games, but... let's just say it brings us to our second problem.

The thing is – there was no real need for this game to exist. When it came out, the Total War series was at the peak of its popularity. Creative Assembly had just released Napoleon, while Shōgun 2 was already on its way. And The King's Crusade? While being pretty much the same exact thing, it just can't compete. Despite all the improvements, it's still just yet another one of those clunky and unpolished European games that require you to go through the school of hard knocks in order to start enjoying them. With no other similar games on the horizon, it might be worth it, but with, like, an infinite amount of Total War content that just keeps coming up to the day I write this? Like I said, why? Why waste your time on this while you can do (much) better? Especially nowadays, when the visuals, which weren't bad at launch, have become dated and it's somewhat hard to make this game work.

And yes, this here is yet another one of those cheap releases. Despite selling us tons of their crappy DLCs (DLC units won't even work in multiplayer, which, surprisingly, still works), Paradox never bothered updating this game in order to work on modern systems “out of the box.” Like with Crusaders: Thy Kingdom Come before it, The King's Crusade will require NTCore's 4GB Patch (again, the patch itself is tiny, and the whole “4 GB” thing comes from the fact that it allows the old games to access more than 4GB of RAM on 64-bit systems) and, most likely, dgVoodoo 2, too, in order to work on, say, Windows 11. No, it's not hard to apply those by yourself. But come on. You pay $11.99 (yes, the full experience still costs twelve bucks in Steam)? You might expect the game to... you know, work.

So yeah. Like I said, The King's Crusade is not a bad game. Not bad at all. Exactly the opposite; it's totally fine. It just fails to provide you with a reason to bother. Neocore wanted to make a sequel to their beloved King Arthur, the audience was more than satisfied with the Total War games that kept coming, and as a result, The King's Crusade ended up just staying there, lost and confused like John Travolta on that GIF from Pulp Fiction. And that was the end of the road for the Crusaders series. Neocore already had other ideas, but that, my friends, is a story for another day.