King Arthur is dead and you, Mordred, are dead killing him. Now Arthur has cursed the afterlife. To bring peace to the island of Avalon, you must do what you do best: Kill Arthur – or rather, the variety of vile villains whose souls have been transformed. For those of you who have been a fan of Neocore Games’ previous dark fantasy game, King Arthur: A Role-Playing Wargame, the idea behind King Arthur: Knight’s Tale really very welcome. Don’t expect a retelling of classic romances like Malory or cinematic depictions, but expect your favorite Arthurian characters to show up in some form of twisted afterlife and Let them engage in battles between some powerful knights and hordes of enemies using a rich combat system. It’s a literally giant game – a sprawling adventure that’s perhaps too repetitive for its sake.
That’s about 120 GB installed – a huge, unoptimized but captivating game though or perhaps because of its raw edges. In it it packs everything I’d expect out of context: rescuing fair maidens, slaying dragons, fighting giants – it’s all here, all with a terrifying twist. , spread over a strategy RPG that could easily eat up 70 to 100 hours of your time as you align with the forces present in Avalon: The Old Gods, Christianity, Righteousness, and Violence God. Lovers like Tristan and Isolde appear, but Tristan is now a rotting zombie; Percival was here, but the Holy Grail quest may now never be completed; and Gawain is trying to commit some genocide.
What Knight’s Tale is true, absolutely true, is the fantasy of being an armored knight. Your characters are largely tanks and used properly, they are like tractors tearing through crowds of enemies, turn by turn. It’s incredibly satisfying, and the rules of Knight’s Tale build on that experience. The basic mechanics of combat are a great strategy RPG, where they force you to pay attention to factors like face, distance, unit type, etc.
Characters have three health bars: Armor reduces damage taken directly but can be lowered with armor-reducing attacks; Hotspots are just what you think – and they add up to the maximum from mission to mission; Longer-lasting health, a reserve of health to back up hit points that can only be restored while resting in Camelot’s hospice. In addition, the loss of Vitality carries the risk of long-term injuries such as fractures and disease. But fear not: as long as you’re careful around enemies that might break it, the armor will protect all but the most reckless of knights from lasting harm.
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To make up for the ability to absorb all that punishment, your knights are almost always outnumbered. While early game battles often have even odds, in the middle of the game it’s rare to see an encounter without 12 or more enemies against your four knights. Heck, some will throw a few dozen enemies against you… some of them can summon even more baddies to the battlefield. Your knights can only do so much in one turn, limited by a rather limited action points system, so get more action points through gear, skills, and weapons Especially advanced will become the clutch game.
The larger numbers also mean that the direction your characters face is an important part of combat in Knight’s Tale. While it may not seem like that at first, having your character facing the enemy is very important as it allows the user to shield attacks and people to avoid brutal back attacks. . In terms of importance, it’s surprising that there aren’t any visual indicators when you’re around, so you should always double-check all of your character’s appearances before the end. your turn or risk the consequences.
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Unfortunately, combat encounters don’t always live up to their promise of fun rules because while there are plenty of highlights, just too many of them bring down the average. jar. Terrain is often bland, lacks variety, or simply doesn’t exist. You regularly go up against the same four types of units, possibly with a thrown boss, in different mixes, in seven or eight battles in the same mission. Some battles are just a waste of your time: 12 enemies at once, or worse, short skirmishes of two or three easily defeated enemies, taking longer to start and ending vs real fighting.
In between these lengthy quests, you return to Camelot, where you can build and upgrade buildings, make lords decisions such as settling disputes between lords and buying new equipment. Nothing too deep there, no big research tree or anything to go through, but it’s a nice enough little meta-game between adventures.
And make no mistake: adventures are at the heart of Tales of Knights. You have a round table of 12 knights, with some substitutions in the wings, but there are 30 characters to collect, so you’re always kicking the ones you don’t like to the curb. To keep your team members leveled up, you can train them off-screen, but there’s also enough quests – especially with tougher difficulties – you need to run two or three innings teams. separately at the same time. It took me 65 hours to finish King Arthur: Knight’s Tale, though after a while I just started dropping the side quests and diving into the end because I’ve had enough of those repetitive battles.
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The experience of sending teams on epic quests is essential to the Arthurian feel, and I liked that part, but the individual quests in Knight’s Tale are just… too long. You roam around the map, getting ambushed and constantly surprised by enemies, picking up small chests filled with trinkets and often doing what I would call the hectic equivalent of a very little knight to get small rewards. There’s a reason you don’t have to run around looting after a mission in XCOM or Fire Emblem: It’s just not fun.
Maybe I would have been more lenient on quests if those stories were excellent, but they don’t get that leniency. Some of them are fun, interesting twists to the stories of your Arthurian world-wide stars, but most are grueling fantasy stories or obvious journeys from start to finish. last. Dark fantasy text in a single note is usable at best; often it’s both boring and confusing with grammatical errors.
However, the overall story is very good. It’s fun to fight in the strange afterlife where no one is sure what the new rules are. The story goes deeper than you might expect, not only incorporating Arthurian lore and Christian mythology, but also delving into pre-Christian Britannic practices, including the gods and spirits of the land. Wales and Ireland. It also incorporates nicely into the optional post-campaign gameplay, where, after defeating the evil Arthur, you battle an invasion of giants and other mythical beasts. But this story is too long for its good.
