King Arthur Knight’s Tale

Historical accounts differ on the truth of King Arthur’s existence, whether fact or myth. The legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table has become a legend of heroism and courage passed down through generations. Well, not in our game, because this time King Arthur Knight’s Tale takes us to the other side and lets us take on the role of the warrior Mordred, who has only one goal in mind: to kill King Arthur! Will this strategic game succeed in reviving the legend? Continue reading.

Game Overview

As one might expect from the idea, the game King Arthur Knight’s Tale is like a dark retelling of the story of King Arthur, as it makes him the main enemy of the story and Mordred the hero. After the historic battle between them ended, they each eliminated the other and then each of them returned to life. Where Mordred finds himself in Avalon and now the Lady of the Forest assigns Mordred a mission: to eliminate Arthur, Mordred sets out to complete his mission with the help of the former Knights of the Round Table, each of whom faces a dilemma.

Recruiting Knights

The Knights of the Round Table represent the heroic characters in this strategy game, and the player will recruit them to his side one by one through missions in the game, forming a squad of usually 4 knights. The player can give them titles and upgrade their weapons and armor between missions by visiting his base in Camelot. There the player can lead the group, train them and improve the facilities that will support them on their journey. Party management is very important because the game is challenging with high difficulty and you have to work hard and cheap to achieve victory.

Mission Design

This game, as mentioned above, is of the strategic type and we found the design of the missions to be stereotypical and linear, as the player has to choose the missions he wants to carry out on the map and in choosing which mission the player explores the map and fights the battles. The battles do not take place in real time, but on the ground. Much like the Fire Emblem games, King Arthur is divided into a grid of movement spaces that lacks the tactical genius and depth of that series. In fact, there’s a kind of repetition in the way missions are designed: meet one of the Knights of the Round Table, start exploring, fight several consecutive battles, and then eliminate the boss or final challenge to the map to win.

Unique Abilities

As expected, each Knight of the Round Table hero has their own set of skills, some specializing in close combat, others in long-range combat using a bow and arrow or even magic, and the player can also set traps. At the end of one of the battles, the player continues to explore the map to collect loot and money, and at the end of the entire chapter the party receives the collected loot as well as experience points to improve the party. Over time, it becomes difficult to choose the members of the party, especially when you start meeting legendary heroes from the stories of King Arthur, but be careful, dear player, because the fall of one of the knights will result in his permanent loss.

Narrative and Choices

The game offers a wide range of narrative options and a map for those options. Unfortunately, progress on this map is very slow, especially early in the game. Through the choices, Mordred’s character will move between the protector and the tyrant on the one hand, and between ancient or Christian beliefs on the other, and as you, dear reader, would expect, your knighthood will not always be happy with your decisions, and these decisions will too decide which legendary heroes you get. If we wanted to be negative, we’d say that tying the acquisition of certain characters to moral choices isn’t a positive, but it at least gives the game some replay value.

Combat and Graphics

The game’s combat is fun, even if it lacks variety. The music in the game impressed me with its way of stimulating the imagination, but the graphics are relatively poor or average, which in our opinion does not detract from the game, especially not the beautiful artistic drawings of the heroes, such as the Drawing of the knight Dindraine. The strength of the storytelling, besides its dark nature, lies in a story full of history and myth, but it is not distinctive in itself as there are no texts to remember or characters to imprint in the memory. Instead, the narrative plays a role in building the game world, giving it an epic feel and also presenting some attractive ideas, but is not the focus and does not steal the spotlight from the gameplay. To be honest, we would have liked a better narrative, and perhaps the idea of ​​characters dying permanently would have prevented that.

Conclusion

This game presents the legend of King Arthur in its own dark style and allows the player to experience the story, or rather the aftermath of the story, from the perspective of Mordred, killing Arthur who has begun to terrorize the innocent and the innocent . The game does not fail to achieve its strategic goals, as its world is rich and its battles fierce, but the feeling of repetition prevails and the game requires a lot of time to manage resources and characters even outside of battles. The exploration element isn’t strong enough and the storytelling doesn’t shine enough to be a strength of this game. However, we can only applaud what the development team has achieved with this masterful game.

The publisher has provided a review copy for the PC