2016 Awards
THE GAME OF THE YEAR
CRUSADER KINGS III
Fraser Brown: Crusader Kings III is this
year’s best strategy game, but it’s also one
of the greatest RPGs and sandboxy sims
around as well. On the surface, it’s not much of a
departure from its predecessor, but this is a game
with astounding ambition that couldn’t have
happened without eight years of Crusader Kings
II. It refines and reconfigures so much that, while
at a glance it’s familiar, it’s far from a repeat.
It’s been made knowing that the audience for
this sort of thing is surprisingly large and broad,
something Paradox probably wasn’t that sure of
last time, and that means it’s also the studio’s most
accessible grand strategy behemoth. It remains
endlessly complex, but the abundance of nested
tooltips and all the different ways it guides you,
subtly and overtly, makes it a lot more palatable,
even if it’s still a bit on the intimidating side.
Let it get its hooks in you and you’ll have
something that will keep you engaged for the
foreseeable future. If you fancy a quiet life
managing some smallholdings in West Africa,
you can take that break, or you take some Vikings
to Asia, start a generation-spanning war and
establish a controversial new religion where you
eat people. Whether you dream big or small, it’s
really about the members of your court. Jealous
knights, torture-obsessed spouses, kids who
keep getting lost in the woods and eaten by bears- you’ll have to keep your eye on
them all. They’re maddening
and wonderful and I’m really
sorry I keep assassinating them.
Rick Lane: I knew I would love
Crusader Kings III when I
discovered that there, is a
House Lane. With the motto
of ‘We Choose Violence’,
House Lane
comprises a
single woman
named Debbie
who is both a
lunatic and a
nymphomaniac.
Ascribed to no
court and with
no other family,
she exists as an island in the
game’s aristocratic ocean.
Once I learned this, I knew I
had to elevate House Lane from
a horny madwoman living as a
hermit into a global medieval
power. Self-imposed
mission accepted, I
married Debbie off
to an Irish Duke
under a matrilineal marriage,
gave her offspring land of their
own, then switched over to her
eldest son when he came of age.
Now King Brian Lane rules all
of Ireland, which extends across
the Irish Sea, engulfing large
parts of Scotland and northern
England (or, as it’s known in
my 1066, the
Danelaw).
This is the
beauty of
Crusader Kings
III. It lets you
spin your own
narrative
tangent through
its immensely
detailed medieval world, coming
up with ridiculous ‘what if’
scenarios and watching the
consequences ripple across
hundreds of years of history.
A game that lets you become
pope is interesting enough. A
game that lets you marry, kill,
then eat the pope is something
else entirely.THE MOST
ACCESSIBLE
GRAND STRATEGY
BEHEMOTHBEST
STRATEGY