![]() Runes can be found as loot or for sale in shops and provide a wide range of abilities and perks when equipped such as life steal, armor protection, bonus health, and so on. ![]() These upgrades add sockets (slots) where you can install runes. Over the course of play, you’ll find materials that you can use at a blacksmith to upgrade your weapons and armor. How you balance or focus the development and skills for a particular hero will either be the key to victory or lead to an early demise!Įach hero also has a stock weapon, armor, and ring slot. As heroes gain experience and level up, you’ll choose an attribute to boost (health, critical hit chance, strength, or dodge chance). Hero stats and equipment follow the keep-it-simple design trend, but afford some tough decision making never-the-less. Yet I feel Crowntakers strikes a nice balance between rewarding you regularly for playing, while keeping you chasing the special achievements. This heavily incentivizes replay, which given the difficulty, is something you’ll end up doing anyway! In many games of this ilk, these systems can feel like a forced easy mode that undermines the roguelike nature of the game. These variants are unlocked by accomplishing certain feats with that hero (e.g. Are you heavy on ranged combat, or stealth and evasion, or armor and damage absorption? You’ll need to figure this out quickly.Įach of the ten characters has two additional unlockable variants, each with different intrinsic abilities. And when it comes to tactical combat (more on this in a moment), character selection can make a big impact on the strategies you have at your disposal. Each of the ten heroes (your main character plus the nine extra mercenaries you can recruit) has a unique set of abilities in terms of how they attack, defend, and what their support actions are. Yet I have found that the choices you might face can have serious consequences. The RPG elements in Crowntakers are fairly light, with limited options for character development. This is a good moment to talk about the characters and the RPG side of the game. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger! As you unlock more and more heroes, they will show up in the taverns and you’ll have more choices next time as to who you want to recruit to your party, up to a maximum of four. Additional mercenaries are unlocked by playing through the game additional times (like in Dungeon of the Endless or FTL ) and accomplishing each hero’s special sidequest (usually killing some evil-doer or seeking revenge on some poor sap). There are up to nine of these unlockable mercenaries. Taverns allow you to recruit additional heroes into your party from a nice menu. Most of the special locations offer places to rest or search for treasure, options which are tantalizing but also consume precious time, similar to what we see in BEDLAM. Tough choices, indeed.Īs you eXplore a region there will be hostile encounters and special locations to interact with, along with a host of shopkeepers, blacksmiths, taverns, castle keeps, and so on, each affording their own opportunities or disasters. Additional exploration might help you get stronger, but it also means the enemies will get stronger sooner. This growing difficulty builds a nice tension between exploring every nook and cranny of a region versus moving on to the next region right away. In a nod to FTL there is a timer – the strength of encounters increases with each passing day. Each of these regions contains a number of different pathways you can take as you explore and search for the exit portal to the next region. Your quest to free the king requires you to journey across seven procedurally generated overworld regions that encompass four different landscape types (woodland, alpine, etc.). Except instead of being an honorable hero, you’re more of an opportunistic scoundrel-type when it comes down to it. In Crowntakers, you start off as the proverbial “Hero” character. What more can you ask for, yo? Well, I suppose you will want to know what Crowntakers is all about! Alrighty then, on with the show.Įxploring the early regions of the game – in the rain. It does this in a very concise package with excellent technical execution. The game is very clear about what it is trying to accomplish and the experience it wants to create. I’m going to cut right to the chase: I like Crowntakers quite a bit. But story aside, Crowntakers wants to be a bit like a medieval fantasy version of FTL (Faster Than Light). The king wants you to know that you are indeed the one and only super special chosen one who can free him. Ostensibly, the plot hinges around trying to rescue an imprisoned king who spoke to you in a dream. ![]() ![]() Bulwark Studios’ Crowntakers is a strategy RPG with a hearty dose of roguelike elements thrown in. ![]()
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