Was Defender of the Crown the first “4X” strategy game to come from Western developers? I know it’s not a proper 4X, as several of the “Xes” are severely undercooked or nonexistent, and Japan’s Nobunaga’s Ambition beat it to market by several years, but when you look at it, you can easily see where the likes of Europa Universalis and Civilization came from. As a kid growing up on a steady diet of King Arthur and Robin Hood stories, the idea of building armies to conquer England was always an appealing one, and Defender of the Crown really tapped into that.
Now, 40 years later, the game is back with Defender of the Crown. Obviously, the various strategy genres have moved on from what Defender of the Crown conceptualised, but the game remains a compelling challenge, and with Defender of the Crown: The Legend Returns, you actually get a pack of three games in one.
The original Defender of the Crown is maintained for the sake of nostalgia. The developers have done very little to touch this, other than make some mild quality-of-life updates to the UX. If you’ve never played Defender of the Crown, the basic idea of it is this: You start with one territory on a map of England that is split up into two dozen or so territories. Your job is to conquer the entire area by moving your armies against other territories, which provide you with more resources each “turn” once conquered, allowing you to recruit more soldiers and power the war effort. Critically, you only control one “leader” at a time, meaning that you need to shift between attack and defence because the other territories are going to be constantly attacking yours.
In battle, you don’t directly control your forces. Instead, you watch as, in real time, the engine decides how effective your armies are in fighting the opponent. You’ve got a couple of options for attack ranging from more defensive “strategies” to all-out attack, but ultimately success comes down to whether you’ve got a larger army than your opponent, and whether your leader has a better “leadership” rating. The strategy is simple, but thanks to the multiple opponents and angles from which you can be attacked, Defender of the Crown is an enormously challenging game that will really test your ability to manage resources.
In addition to the strategy, there are two minigames, both of which can result in you winning additional land. One is jousting, where you have to line your lance up with your opponent to try to unhorse them. The other is a castle raid where you need to defeat a number of opponents in swordplay. These add variety to the base game, which is sorely needed given how the combat is not particularly interactive, but they’re also not the most complex minigames, so after a few rounds of Defenders they do start to wear thin.
That’s the original mode, restored lovingly in this new game after 40 years. Classic Mode, meanwhile, takes that base game and modernises it, giving it a genuinely appealing art style so that it looks like a modern strategy game. Critically, the two main minigames are much (much) better in this version. There’s also a visual depiction of battles with arrows that represent the tactics that you’ve chosen. Arrows! Arrows in strategy games are always fun. The interface is also significantly cleaned up, allowing you to see at a glance which of the factions is not at war with you (in the start of the game, two of the five enemy castles are in a “tense peace” with you and won’t attack unless you attack them, giving you some time to deal with the hostiles first). This mode also allows you to see where you’ve distributed soldiers to protect castles.
In the end, though, it’s not enough of an upgrade on the original, as the game plays the same way and offers the same AI. It’s the default way to play this package on account of the modern elements, but it could have been built into something more.
The effort to offer “more” is in the “Kingdom mode”, which is essentially a roguelike with little resemblance to Defender of the Crown. In this mode, you start in one corner of the map, and have to make your way to the bottom corner, fighting enemy armies along the way. These battles play out as a dice game. You roll dice, and then modify the scores on both your dice and your opponents’ using cards that you collect along the way (and in true roguelike style you’ll earn better cards as you go along). At the end of several turns of this, the side with the highest total on the dice wins the battle.
It works, and is even fun for one or two runs, but ultimately too shallow by roguelike standards. There isn’t enough variety in the cards or strategy, and it’s so distant from the proper Defender of the Crown game that it seems out of place. I liked the intent to do something different with the property while maintaining the original to show respect for it, but the roguelike has been done to death, and this needed to be more than it is to be worthwhile.
I’m just spitballing here, but personally, if I were helming some effort to bring a new Defender of the Crown to market, I would try ideas like adding multiplayer, or expanding the scope of England to allow for broader tactics, or turning it into a proper 4X by building economic and diplomatic systems into it. I might also try giving the player control in battles to add a tactical layer to the strategy, or building some kind of system to allow players to overcome larger enemy numbers through superior tactics. If I were being really ambitious, I would even consider adding an action mode that allowed you to directly participate in battle, Dynasty Warriors-style.
There is a lot that can be done with Defender of the Crown, so while I’m very happy to have the original game playable on my Switch, practically speaking, this game is like buying a retro game, I can’t help but feel that this was a wasted opportunity, overall. I mean, look at what Defender of the Crown’s peers have become: Nobunaga’s Ambition or Civilization (with the first Civ released 5 years after Defender of the Crown). Defender of the Crown: The Legend Returns is not so much a “return” as something that is playing purely on the nostalgia of the elder millennials who grew up with it.
