Apparently 2022 is the year of the turn-based tactics RPG. It's May and so far I've played Wartales, an excellent but still Early Access game about playing a mercenary captain; Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters, which I reviewed several weeks ago; Expeditions: Rome, which I just bought but haven't yet played; Solasta: Crown of the Magister, a decent D&D5E adaptation for the PC which I've been meaning to review; the upcoming Hard West II, sequel to the mediocre Western XCOM-clone; and now King Arthur: Knight's Tale, a dark fantasy adaptation of Arthurian legend.
After a week of solid play I've finished the latter. At first I was shocked that the game received such mediocre reviews. As a tactics game it stands out from the vast bland ocean of its peers. Despite a multitude of issues with narrative there's plenty to praise. Yet as the hours ticked by the tide receded, revealing the rotting carcasses of countless salmon lodged in the shores alongside non-biodegradable six-pack yokes. I realized then that I had to write a review of my own. So here it is: my opinion on Knight's Tale after having finished the main campaign and most, but not all, side content.
The Beginning
In King Arthur: Knight's Tale, you play Mordred, the man you might remember as Arthur's arch-nemesis from that unit in high school you slept through. Immediately after dying, Mordred wakes up in a dank dungeon on the Isle of Avalon, upon which the Kingdom of Britannia has been mirrored in a perverted afterlife-like form. With Arthur mysteriously missing Mordred declares himself king of the New Camelot and sets about recruiting a neo-Round Table, with new knights inspired by characters from across all Arthuriana--living or dead.
Except Arthur. His soul has been split in four. You have to kill all four of his soul shards for some reason. Also he's a dragon.
Spoiler alert.
If this all makes no sense to you, playing the game won't help.
In other words, in King Arthur: Knight's Tale, you don't play King Arthur, but King Mordred. It also has nothing in particular to do with a "knight's tale," since this is in fact the tale of Arthur and Mordred after their deaths, and so would more fittingly be titled "Kings' Tale." In consonance with this rather bizarrely chosen name, the game itself has very little to do with Arthurian legend per se beyond flavor. In effect it looks and feels like a Dragon Age dark fantasy--which, to the designers' credit, is how it's billed. The one notable trace of Arthurian legend is the cast, which is to say the names, and not much else.
Fortunately I don't give a shit about Arthuriana. Dragon Age is as good as Britannia as far as I'm concerned. If King Arthur gives a place for the designers to start, then so be it.
Roleplaying Game?
I want to home in on the narrative first. Narrative is what pulled me into Knight's Tale, but not for long.
This is a roleplaying game. As Mordred drives out the Skeletor who was keeping him imprisoned in Camelot's dungeon, he is given his opportunity to declare himself King of Avalon (or wherever), and you are given your first choice: are you Good Guy, or are you Bad Guy?
Good Guy (AKA 'Rightful') and Bad Guy (AKA 'Tyrant') are thankfully signalled to us with little lion and boar heads, respectively, so we always know which option is which. This is useful because the first option we're given, as we declare ourselves king, is an identical sentiment--both result in you declaring yourself king. But one is good, one is bad. For some reason.
In addition to Good Guy and Bad Guy you also choose between Pagan and Christian, so that in effect the game has a four-way morality axis thus:
For no particular reason I played Bad Guy Mordred, I suppose because Mordred is supposed to be one of the ultimate Bad Guys in English literature--and also because I chose the Tyrant option at the start of the game. At this very moment my costs were sunk; I stuck to my guns from then-on.
You'll notice that these choices are not cosmetic. The story doesn't branch, but thresholds of morality give certain rewards, including unique companions and special mechanics to change your playstyle. A Tyrant Pagan , for example, is the only player who will unlock Sir Dagonet. This is the reason I went with Pagan ultimately: Morgana le Fay seemed a considerably better prospective companion than Sir Galahad. In addition to special unlocks, each companion has his own morality, and your decisions will affect his loyalty--and thereby his performance in the field of battle.
I don't regret my paganism, but sticking to Tyrant ended up a mistake. Bad Guy Mordred gets the Red Knight and the Black Knight. Neither of these are well-known or well-defined characters from Arthurian legend. To the extent they are characters at all, it's as archetypes, or general epithets used by a number of different personalities. How exciting!
Neither the Red Knight nor the Black Knight proved remotely interesting. Meanwhile, Good Guy Mordred gets motherfuckin' SIR LANCELOT.
Man. Who would you rather have on your roster? The Black Knight--some random guy you've never heard of--or SIR LANCELOT?
All that said, I like this system. It adds an element of replayability, and although the narrative doesn't seem to branch per se, your morality does make a difference to mission availability: an entire end-game sidequest chain for me was about tracking down and killing Lancelot. Presumably this would not have been available had Lancelot been in my party. (Although you never know.)
It should be noted that, like so many of these games, Bad Guy ends up equating to "pointlessly evil," while Good Guy equals Jesus. But then legend rarely is the place for nuance.
Beyond morality points, your decisions in dialogue and event trees matter for nothing. This is what ultimately soured me on the story, and is a recurrent theme throughout the rest of the game. Another event: a wall of text, then four options. One gives Good Guy, one gives Bad Guy, one gives Pagan, one gives nothing. I need Pagan to get to Morgana faster; ergo, I choose Pagan, regardless of text.
Not only do I lack an incentive to read and engage with the text, but in fact I have a disincentive, because it doesn't actually matter--my conclusion is foregone by mechanistic necessity.
I wasn't bothered by this for the first ten hours of the game. But thereafter, there was too much. Too many events. Too many dialogue trees. Just too much. Like Daemonhunters, Knight's Tale is flatly overwritten. The characters need to shut up, sit down, and stop talking.
Magyar Mayhem
Years ago I read an Ursula Le Guin essay in which she derided the modern fantasy author who writes dialogue for princes, kings, and fantastical heroes in the same manner he might write dialogue for the man who sells hotdogs on Capitol Hill. I can't find this essay to quote from it directly, but it's stuck with me ever since as something obvious--yet a rule often broken in pop culture.
King Arthur: Knight's Tale doesn't break the rule so much as it tosses it into a volcano and watches it bubble away like the One Ring alongside Gollum. The dialogue in this game is very poor. It rarely feels setting-appropriate; your companions say the wrong things in the wrong ways; they never feel like chivalric knights from the Middle Ages. They, including Mordred, say things like "also" and "anyway," using casual and modern speech that is horrifically inappropriate.
This comes as no great surprise. NeocoreGames, the developers, are Hungarian, and either the translation is bad or they spent no kingly sum on their writers. I take no especial umbrage at this for a AA game, yet all the same I have to ask, if you aren't going to take the time to ensure a good translation, why you would INCLUDE SO MUCH DIALOGUE?
Every word is voice-acted, too, by the way. Every single word. They saved by recycling the same three VAs over and over again (all with gruff American accents for some reason), but I still can only imagine the cost of so much production--and all for what? To hear Mordred say, "I was going to kill you, hahaha! Anyway, let's go do the adventure."
Cementing your rule over Avalon is a decent conceit for a story. I like a lot of what the narrative is doing. But there was too much in the end. Too much dialogue, too poorly written; I couldn't sit through it all. The world was confusing, too, and I didn't understand what was happening even when I was paying close attention.
Consequently I skipped almost every line of dialogue except in the final confrontation with Arthur pictured above (spoiler alert). Doing this made the game drag quite a lot more, unfortunately--but listening to it all would've been even worse.
I don't know how else to summarize my thoughts on this topic than to quote the final words of the game back at you:
The fight for Avalon is over, but the battle has just begun.
Firstly: this is a cliché. Generally one does not want to end their story on the note of a cliché.
Secondly: they didn't even get the cliché right. "Fight" and "battle" are near perfect synonyms. The actual expression corrected would have been,
The battle for Avalon is over, but the war has just begun.
Even this makes no sense because Avalon is completely self-contained, so if the battle for Avalon is truly over then so too must be the war. It may be that the intention is more along the lines of: the [war] with King Arthur may be concluded, but there are many battles yet to come. That would make far more sense, given the ending's foreshadowing.
I can only assume this all makes much more sense in Hungarian. If it doesn't, then Neocore, you really need to hire better writers. Like me. Hire me! I'll move to Hungary!
The Isle of Avalon
Rather than a spaceship or military facility, Mordred's home base is Camelot. Each quest earns you Gold and the evocatively-named Building Resources with which to renovate your facilities. There you'll train, equip, treat, and cure your Round Table that you've gathered from across the realm. Four knights go out at a time, and while Mordred is required for story missions, you can send anyone out in any combination otherwise.
All this requires micromanagement in the extreme. Every knight must be individually placed in training, individually told to set his broken arm, individually told to heal his Vitality pool, etc. With that caveat it's an engaging overworld. The upgrades make significant enough differences in the tactical gameplay to create ambivalent decisions, and resources are scarce enough to make those decisions matter. You won't have everything, even after the credits roll.
From the overworld you select one main mission at a time, or, if feeling underleveled, from a slew of side missions. As far as I can tell these side missions are not optional, as I was nearly underleveled by the end despite sending the same four knights on every side quest as soon as it was available. Focusing purely on the main story would result on being massively underpowered, and almost certainly make the game impossible before long.
Events occur every few missions. These involve either sending a single knight out on a quest of his own for a single adventure, or resolving some morality decision.
You'll want to earn the loyalty of your companions for powerful bonuses to their capabilities on the field of battle. Take their traits under consideration while you're deciding if you're a Good Guy or Bad Guy. Then sort through your loot and gear them up for the next quest, presuming they haven't sustained any injures that need healing.
Be careful that they haven't. If Vitality reaches zero, the hero in question is permanently killed--and Vitality damage doesn't heal except through time spent at Hospice.
I like the overworld in Knight's Tale. It could be deeper, but for fulfilling the fantasy of Arthurian roundtable management, it comes extremely close to what I would have wanted. You feel like a king, making decisions, gathering retainers, renovating your keep. You feel powerful. Regular returns to the map of Avalon is where Knight's Tale is strongest, where the interplay between tactics and strategy matters most.
Turn-Based Tactics
King Arthur: Knight's Tale is a melee-focused turn-based tactics game. There are four classes: the Defender, the Champion, the Sage, and the Arcanist, which might be analogized as the Protection Paladin, the Arms Warrior, the Battle Mage, and the Mage Mage, but the reality in-play is more complicated. Every character on your roster is a hero who must be recruited--a distinctive, voice-acted personality from Arthurian legend, from Mordred to Sir Lancelot to Morgawse and Guinevere. While each will fall broadly within the archetypes noted above, their skills are shuffled around, and each feels different in important ways.
On the ground, your characters have a number of action points depending on their equipment and how heavy their armor is. Spend these on abilities, movement, and attacks. Balance your Armor and Hit points, and make sure your Vitality never gets too low: if it does, you'll begin to sustain injuries, and if it reaches zero, you'll die--forever.
I found the systems engrossing, especially as the game progresses. Early on there isn't much to do but reserve AP and wait until the enemy approaches. Later, though, Mordred becomes Zeus, unlocking the power of thunder and lightning. His mother Morgawse proved to be my favorite knight with her ability to conjure thunderstorms and smite people across the map with shards of ice. By the final battle with Arthur I was regaining AP left and right, casting mass AoE, teleporting between strikes with Sir Kay, dominating the battlefield.
Between fights you navigate the map in a Dragon Age: Origins-reminiscent fashion. I quite like the graphics, which are dark and atmospheric and full of visual effects of leaves caught in whirlwinds, flickering fires, and trees quivering in the wind. The whole game has the atmosphere of a chilly autumn day.
A bit like Dragon Age: Origins, though, you might find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer number of abilities at play. I restricted myself to the four knights you see screenshotted above, as well as Boudica and Sir Ector when occasion demanded their substitution in due to the injury of a principle player. Remembering each active ability wasn't so challenging, but keeping the dozens and dozens of passive effects straight proved too much for me.
Each active ability has four potential passive skills, with many more passives on the tree. These range from minor to playstyle defining. I like the trees overall: they're well-designed and mostly interesting, with minimal boring or throwaway enhancements, or at least enough gamechangers to make those few that aren't exciting less offensive by comparison.
But it isn't within my capacity to remember the entire skilltrees of twelve different knights and all their respective changing passive abilities, and also their active abilities, over the course of a campaign. This design philosophy works only with the provision that the game wants you to focus on a handful of characters while neglecting the rest. Indeed the plentiful lack of XP to go around would indicate this is just the case.
Yet one wonders why there are twelve knights at all then, and why we have XCOM-like permadeath mechanics in the first place, if this is the case. There seems to be some degree of incoherence in the systems in this regard. The whole game is about gathering a new Round Table: why are we limited to only four knights the whole time? It doesn't quite make sense.
At the end of the day I think what NeocoreGames has is good, but I can see how it might have been better.
Difficulty Rating
I played on normal and enjoyed the gameplay a lot. Let me be clear as I proceed that I think King Arthur: Knight's Tale is an excellent tactics game. But there are serious issues worth consideration with the pacing, level design, and manner of difficulty curve on display--issues which detract from the overall experience so much that I went from wondering why the reviews of this game were so mediocre, to unfortunately agreeing with them entirely.
The essence of all Knight's Tale's problems can be distilled more or less along the following lines:
The missions in this game go on for way, way, way too fucking long.
Let me give an example.
The Lady of the Lake sends Mordred to close four portals in the woods. To get to the woods, you need to fight two major battles with eight to fourteen enemies each. These battles take between five and ten minutes. Then, to reach the first portal, you need to fight another battle of similar length. Then, at the first portal, there's another battle, this one the largest so far.
At this point you've been in the adventure for half an hour at least, and you feel like you're done. But you glance at your objectives and realize it says: Portals Closed (1/4).
So you head back out into the woods. You wander around senselessly for a while, stumbling into more battles, all of which are the same, until you finally clean up every last portal. By now it's been over an hour and your brain is melting. You need the break of returning to the overworld. This quest has gone on for so long.
"But wait, Mordred!" cries the Lady of the Lake. "Hear me! You must now fight the Ultimate Portal Boss Monster!"
Thus you're teleported to the REAL final boss of the quest, and another ten or so minutes passes before you're finally set free.
Almost every mission in the game follows this structure. Countless battles, most of which are indistinguishable, in quests that go on interminably. More frequent returns to Camelot would do so much to break up the monotony of fighting identical Unseelie (whatever that is) in identical woods, but without those returns, almost everything after the first act becomes a brutal slog. Two or three encounters per quest would have been sufficient. Eight? Nine? Fourteen? Forget it.
This was where I started skipping dialogue.
It's a strange combination, too. The gameplay itself continues to be fun and engaging. Yet every battle is the same: every battle tests the same skills, nothing ever changes. I know how to do everything without taking damage, and I win without injury (almost) every time. The repetition is mind-numbing.
The designers were cognizant of this failing in their system. Unfortunately, their only remedy was to rely on bullshit level design tactics with which seasoned gamers are no doubt familiar. The primary way they found to ramp up the challenge was to start spawning enemies in in waves, which serves only to prolong combat further and drag out the quests even more. Then, they start spawning enemies in behind you, having them appearing random places--often those same places from which you just came.
To say this is irritating would be an understatement.
These failings lie not so much in systems as they do level design. There needed to be objectives to accomplish, as there are in XCOM 2 or The Banner Saga games (of which I find Knight's Tale highly reminiscent), beyond the repetitive "kill all the dudes on the map." Because that's what it boils down to, every time. Kill all the dudes on the map. Find them, kill them. Over and over and over again. For 25 hours.
Have fun!
In Conclusion
King Arthur: Knight’s Tale is like a delicious shower with a leaky head. It starts off with a full-force blast of hot water; comforting, cozy, everything you want on a cold winter morning in the mountains. You wake up and see snow outside. The chill tingles your skin. Everything is numb–until that hot water saves the day.
You savor every moment under its embrace. You prolong while you can. You experience it every day, but still, there’s nearly nothing so good as this warm shower, with the cold air outside, feeling the steam building all around you.
But the hot water can’t last forever, and you have work to do. So you turn the faucet back toward cold. A brief second of water chills your skin, until it ceases entirely. But that’s part of the experience. You can’t have the good without the bad–so you don’t mind much, and you’re satisfied even as the water stops and you’re left only in steam.
But then you hear the dripping. The dripping from the shower’s head, the dripping of all that liquid that once brought satisfaction. Dripping, dripping down the drain, one droplet at a time, all gone to waste.
The water is still hot. In enough quantity, focused well enough, it would still feel phenomenal. But now it’s dripping away; and you remember then that this shower head always leaks, and so until your next shower tomorrow morning, hot water will continue to be wasted. Completely pointlessly. Funneled away into nothing.
It could be delicious. But its use now is pointless, and there’s nothing for you to do until the repairman arrives.
Knight’s Tale‘s first act is the warm shower. The wobbly narrative is the cold air. Everything that follows is the drip. Elements of a fantastic game–which, when concentrated, could make something beautiful, something euphoric–stretched out and wasted over the course of 24 hours, poured down the narrowest strait imaginable. Not a drain, but tedious, repetitive quests, dragging out what could’ve been a third as long into something a tenth as good.
But should you buy it?
Overall I'm positive on Knight's Tale, but by barely a hair. The second half of the game is tremendously frustrating, but the core systems are good, and there's enough that's unique to make it work. But I was soured enough by that second half to come to the conclusion that this is a deep sale game. It has production value and a primary gameplay loop that works, but everything else leaves a bad taste. That makes it hard to justify for full price.
I purchased a copy from Steam. Total playtime: about 30 hours.