Crusader Kings 3, developed and published by Paradox Interactive, is an RPG strategy game that will truly eat up hours and even days from your life. Crusader Kings explores the life of rulers in the medieval age between the years of 867 and 1453. This is a formative period for the world, with the powers of the old world crumbling and modern-day powers taking shape. Choose a ruler and begin your dynasty, and ensure that your legacy lasts through the centuries.

You are expected to grow your territory on the map while maintaining control over your kingdom and ensuring your dynasty’s existence. Based on the character you chose, you will start as a Count, Duke, King, or Emperor, each being a tier of the medieval social ladder. This dynamic heavily influences your options of whom you can marry, alliance with, how much land you can wage war for, etc. You must also manage your culture and religion as they also greatly influence your character interactions. Other faiths may be hostile towards you, seeking to conquer your land in the name of their god, or your culture may fall behind others, and your technology will become inferior to your neighbors.

This is only half the experience of Crusader Kings 3 as well as managing and defending your kingdom the game also has a strong focus on the individual character you have chosen and the life that character lives this game throws you straight into the life of your character, you have assigned traits and skills that define your character’s personality. You can play the game any way you want, but doing actions that don’t align with your character’s personality causes stress, and too much stress can lead to an early grave.

The first thing you’ll want to do is to pick a lifestyle. This is an internal research mechanic. The game has to help your character develop traits in specific areas of life such as Intrigue, Stewardship, Martial, Learning, and Diplomacy. These traits unlock new actions and interactions with the world that can benefit you greatly if you know how to use them.

Your character development just scratches the surface of the character interaction in this game, You still must build a family, appoint a council of advisors, manage vassals, and more, all of whom have their individual lives with personalities, secrets, families, history, and motives of their own.

The combination of motives and personalities creates a story for each character they meet and helps define your character lives and accomplishments, every one of these people as well as you has opinion of one another and depending on that opinion they could become your friends and create a bond that lasts generations or the opposite and form a rivalry of your two houses forevermore.

Opinion also plays a factor in the stability of your kingdom. If you are a bad king and do things your vassals don’t like, such as aggressive wars or revoking titles without cause, they will turn on you, creating factions to destroy your realm.

Another big aspect of this game is succession. This is the entire future of your dynasty, so you must ensure that it is in good hands and remains held together upon your character’s death. During your character’s life, you must have an heir to succeed you upon your death.

The problem is that if you have multiple heirs, your realm will split apart, or you may have an heir that is simply not fit to rule. These circumstances make it so you are forced to address this issue in often devious and cruel ways against your own family, from prison to straight up murder. There is many ways to deal with this problem, but all of them can affect the reign of your next character. This is one of my favorite parts of Crusader Kings. The fact that it’s played across multiple generations of your family creates an entire history for your kingdom, with the past affecting future generations. Each decision you make as a ruler is crucial to the stability of your realm and dynasties’ future.

Crusader Kings 3 fuses all these mechanics together to create a beautiful and intricate balancing act within their game, as you succeed in one area if you are falling behind another, adding weight to each decision you make as a ruler. The life each character has will affect how you can play the game in the future, impacting your decisions and goals and making a new experience every time you play. The story that’s formed in each game is always memorable and keeps the player interested over hundreds of years of gameplay.

When first beginning my experience with Crusader Kings, I have to say this may have been one of the hardest games I’ve ever learned to play. As mentioned before, the game throws you into the life of your character, and besides a minimal tutorial, the rest is for you to figure out. I spent at least a good 20 hours of my initial game experience learning and understanding the mechanics at play and how to advance in the gameplay.

The mechanics of this game are what makes it so amazing, but at the same time, they work against new players attempting to get into the game. its very discouraging attempting to work towards a goal only to realize you need to do something completely different first before you can complete it.

All games have a certain amount of learning required to play, understanding features and how the game works, etc.. But Crusader Kings takes it to a new level and definitely will take any new play a few hours and a couple you tube videos to fully understand the basics but once they do the payoff will be more than worth as they will more sure than not spend the next day fully involved within the intricate story created by Crusader Kings 3.