Band of Crusaders preview: The Witcher meets Battle Brothers

A grimdark real-time tactical RPG

Virtual Alchemy

Things are not looking too great for Europe. Entire countries have been overrun by demons, who are transforming them into hellish landscapes too inhospitable for a regular human to survive. If only there was a group of heroes to drive them back into the abyss they crawled out from – like, say, a brave Band of Crusaders.

In development at Polish indie studio Virtual Alchemy, Band of Crusaders is heavily influenced by Battle Brothers and the same Polish folklore and history that inspired so much of The Witcher – right down to the houses you see in the game’s settlements, art director Kamil Mickiewicz tells me at Gamescom 2024. 

“It’s actually not on purpose,” he explains. “We just picked the same references from buildings you can visit in some area of cultural preservation and they just happen to come from the same period.”

That’s one aspect of Band of Crusaders that stands out to me immediately as we sit down to play the game – despite its core subject being typical fantasy stuff, its setting feels extremely grounded. Mickiewicz says that Virtual Alchemy wanted to be “genuine about our roots” when deciding on where to set the game and which cultural influences to include.

Like The Witcher, Band of Crusaders has a decidedly Slavic twist to it – but also a religious one, as is apparent from the game’s name. The demons besieging and invading Europe are inspired by the seven deadly sins, for example.

I pick up some German words from the enchanting song that’s serving as the background track for the game’s overworld campaign map and Mickiewicz confirms that my ears don’t deceive me: “We are very proud of our music. It was recorded by a live orchestra and we have our own reinterpretation of one of the real medieval songs, which is called the Palästinalied. It’s a German song. It’s known as the first anthem of the crusaders. We try to have this low fantasy spirit, to be grounded and represent Europe.”

As far as crusades go, one against the demons is probably more productive than its historical counterparts. / Virtual Alchemy

This is reflected in the character’s voices as well with many of them having French or German accents – or something in-between. “To be honest it was our attempt to do a French accent,” Mickiewicz laughs. “Some people hear a French accent, other people hear a German accent.”

Even the design for what the developers call abominations – powerful demonic monsters – is rooted in this philosophy. “It’s something I’m very picky about,” Mickiewicz says. In his world, a demon is not some intelligent being hopping over from another dimension in a portal, like in Dungeons & Dragons. “They are created out of the land itself. Imagine a purely evil force flying across the land like wind, just picking up remnants of dead animals and humans, connecting them and forming these hybrids that shouldn’t exist,” he explains. “In our game you will never see a demon wearing a man-made object. We want to stay away from that.”

Like in Battle Brothers or Mount & Blade, you move your merry band of knights around on the strategic layer of the game – a map of parts of Europe, which contains cities and other places of interest. You’ll find patrols loyal to the time’s medieval kingdoms here, who try to keep the peace and fend off bandits, cultists, and monsters. Fairly standard stuff. Cities serve as quest givers, shopping centers, and recruitment grounds.

As indicated in the opening paragraph, the demonic forces will try to influence all the provinces on the map, slowly corrupting them – this not only leads to more hostile forces spawning, but visually alters both the overworld map and the battle maps you play on. Total War: Warhammer is a great comparison point for this neat detail. In addition to atmospheric changes, the devs plan on associating each corrupted biome with specific debuffs as well. Naturally, one of the biggest tasks for players will be to hinder and revert those developments by bolstering the might, piety, and wealth of provinces. All of these factors help stave off the demonic temptations.

The washed out colors of the map really support the doomsday vibes. / Virtual Alchemy

“You don’t necessarily need to defeat all the demons yourself,” Mickiewicz explains. The factions won’t declare war on each other in this version of Europe, as everyone’s united against the threat posed by the demons. The team thought about adding more complex politics into the picture, but it ended up being too complicated for players to follow and was contradicting the fantasy of man standing against demons. “We wanted to double down on that, instead of making a game about everything,” Mickiewicz reasons.

Another nucleus during your campaign will be your camp, which can be upgraded over time. In the camp, you’ll be able to heal wounded brothers, repair their equipment, and much more.

Characters in Band of Crusaders can be freely customized in terms of abilities, opening up a grand variety of playstyles. “I know every game says that,” Mickiewicz says, “but here we really mean it.”

Band of Crusaders’ talent tree is a behemoth, reminiscent of something you’d see in an ARPG like Diablo. Mickiewicz explains that players could make a character who only has passive skills if they so desire – and there may actually be a good reason for doing this, but we’ll get to that.

Another example Mickiewicz shows off to me is a shield-bearing character, who’s filling the role of a tank. He tells me I could go over to a different branch and pick stuff like bleed application to allow him to deal some damage over time, expanding his role a little bit. “You can go really hybrid and that’s really important to us,” he says.

Your crusaders can have up to three active abilities, but even just one specialization in the skill tree fills that capacity – so what Virtual Alchemy has done to provide players with more choice is a transformation system: Each ability has upgraded versions deeper in the skill tree, keeping its original effects. This way players don’t have to make a choice between a cool late game ability and the basic skill they based a character’s entire build around. Abilities are also dependent on the weapons a character is using – naturally, something like Cleave or Shield Bash won’t work out for an archer. Mickiewicz likens it somewhat to Guild Wars 2.

Currently, there are five different specializations you can freely choose skills from. / Virtual Alchemy

A major difference between Band of Crusaders and Battle Brothers is that Virtual Alchemy’s title isn’t using a turn-based tactical combat system – like the strategic layer, its tactical gameplay is happening in real-time. There is no pause button, though you can heavily slow down time to buy yourself some space for thinking about your next move.

You maneuver and position yourself at the same time as the enemy, so you can use techniques like kiting and splitting you may know from RTS games – in fact, that’s one of the core features of Band of Crusaders’ combat: You’ll want to counteract your enemy’s moveset as well as you can, for example spreading out your team against an enemy with a lot of cleave damage or positioning someone at their back to hit a weak point.

Each character has an armor bar and a health bar, provided by gear and their stats respectively, and the combat system feeds into that with different damage types: Slashing weapons like your typical sword will do great against unarmored targets, whereas something blunt like a mace can be very effective against armor. Polearms on the other hand are piercing weapons, allowing them to partly bypass armor and immediately deal damage to both values.

Like Battle Brothers, permadeath is part of the gameplay loop in Band of Crusaders. “Sacrifices will be quite a common thing,” Mickiewicz says after defeating an abomination with about half of his band falling to the demon before it went down. “You’ll have to play around that by recruiting and not only having squad A, but also having squad B, and maybe squad C. Maybe you need to change around their weapons a bit to prepare for certain enemy types.”

You can fully control each character's equipment. / Virtual Alchemy

With a likely maximum of eight characters per squad (that capacity will probably have to be upgraded over the course of a campaign) it’s easy to see why the team capped the number of active abilities at three and why you may want to have a few brothers focusing on passive skills: Things can get quite busy with that many units in a real-time environment. Still, it’s not like you sit there and only spam abilities – in fact, you’ll want to be very careful about that. Skills cost Stamina to use and your brothers only have so much of that resource.

While some encounters will be straightforward skirmishes on an open field, you will sometimes attack villages occupied by cultists and other, more elaborate locations. In these, you can sneak around a little, trying to pick off patrols and lone enemies before tackling the main force. You can even destroy some elements of the enemy, retreat, and come back later to finish them off. Such locations also offer loot in the form of supplies for the campaign map.

Mickiewicz says that most of the core gameplay systems are “in place” and the team can soon enter a phase in which everything is about “content, content, content.” Things like filters for gear in your inventory and similar quality-of-life improvements are planned as well.

What I’ve seen and played of Band of Crusaders at Gamescom 2024 already felt very matured – and its grimdark fantasy, yet grounded style already marks it out as something I want to keep my eyes on. You can currently wishlist Band of Crusaders on Steam.