King Arthur: Knight's Tale
KA:KT is a turn-based tactical game where you build a round table of knights and trek around Avalon killing bad guys, looting stuff, and trying to kill King Arthur's horcruxes (Arthur is evil.. for some reason?). The loop consists of choosing 4 knights to go on a mission, walking around killing every enemy group (because otherwise you don't get full XP). Finish, assign skill points, sell loot, resolve an event, repeat. Really enjoyed the combat side of things, but thought it was way too long. Major issues with being able to lock yourself out of being able to finish the campaign, which is what I did. Not playing the first 35 hours again, so I guess I'll never finish it.
Pros
- I love the graphics - the landscapes and characters look amazing
- Practically everything is voice acted. They all do a pretty good job too (except you, Sir Yvain)
- Good dialogue between characters, and quests
- You have two major alignment choices to make Faith (Christian / Old Faith) and Morality (Righteous / Tyrant). Playing Christian Tyrant was pretty fun - it's so refreshing to play a game where the main character is designed to be an ass. The combination of any of these 4 unlock different bonuses and characters
- You can use units to break line of sight for other units, so your archer can hide behind the tank
- You can give your knights titles in Camelot, which can affect all kinds of things like the building effectiveness and the knight's loyalty
- There's a loyalty system for knights, which changes based on your actions during events
- Good range of classes (tank, melee DPS, rogue, archer, wizard, and a sort of melee magic user
- Good music - although the normal combat music gets a little repetitive
- You can scout out some fighting areas beforehand, which gives you new positions you can place your units in before the battle begins
- I like how important positioning is. The direction people are facing affects whether they can block or be backstabbed. Ranged characters do half damage if there's an enemy standing next to them, and you can charge / knockdown / pushback enemies to help with positioning advantages
- The buildings in Camelot can be upgraded with gold and materials that you bring back from missions
- There's no percentage chance to miss, which makes it easier to plan your moves
- Great sound effects for weapons
- There are some excellent characters. Sir Bors claims the woman he slept with must have been a witch because he'd taken a vow of chastity and still slept with her... and there was another woman who was going to throw herself off a tower if he didn't sleep with her too. The knights you can hire all have different faiths and moralities, so you can build your round table with like-minded heroes
Cons
- There are multiple ways to back yourself into a corner and make the campaign unwinnable, which I think is unacceptable for a game 60 hours long.
- There's no way to leave a mission, so if you're in a mission that's too hard, you may have some heroes killed, or just be unable to finish the game at all - which is what happened to me. 36 hours in, I'm on a mission with Mordred and an NPC I have to keep alive. All my saves are from during that mission, and it's impossible to beat the last fight and keep Mordred and Gawain alive, which means I would have to start the entire game again. Sorry, not going to happen. Big waste of time.
- Death is permanent, so if you lose too many heroes, you may fail the campaign
- Your heroes may all need healing, and time doesn't pass unless you're on a mission, so it's possible to end up with not enough heroes to go on missions with
- Deeply confusing introduction trailer. I understood nothing about what was going on. For some reason King Arthur was evil? And there was a war, where you killed him. Now you're in the afterlife.. except it's not the afterlife. Perhaps this is based on some lore they established in another game, but given that their other games have terrible reviews, it would have been worth doing a proper explanation of wtf is going on for people who didn't play them. Why was King Arthur evil? Why are people coming back from the dead? What is Avalon?
- In the first major dialogue you have, there are two symbols to choose from. No explanation of what they mean. I had to look them up on the wiki to realise they were morality, but it looked like I was just choosing between a lion or a boar.
- Icons are not explained. For example, if I aim at a zombie next to my archer, the cursor has a brick icon next to it and a yellow line instead of a green one. I assume the yellow line means she'll do less damage because it's standing next to her, but I have no way of knowing. No idea what the brick icon means.
- Most of the things you loot are trash, which means you just end up selling everything after missions. That made the merchant basically just a place to generate gold, I never found anything worth buying.