I’d like to share the exact thought that piqued my interest beyond the point of no return when I started researching King Arthur: Knight’s Tale. “Why, this looks like XCOM meets Darkest Dungeon meets Arthurian mythology. Well, sign me right the heck up for that!” I don’t want to give away my opinion right at the start, but I’ve transcribed quite a lot of my thoughts. Have a seat at my Round Table and get comfortable as I tell you a tale about King Arthur: Knight’s Tale.

In King Arthur: Knight’s Tale, you primarily play as a dread knight called Sir Mordred. Sir Mordred’s desire to become King of Britannia led him to eventually become the nemesis of King Arthur. Sir Mordred and King Arthur fought each other in their final duel. They simultaneously mortally wounded each other, but only Sir Mordred died on the battlefield. King Arthur survived because the Lady of the Lake carried him to the mystical island of Avalon before he succumbed to his wounds. It seems King Arthur has since been horribly affected by the magic within the environment of Avalon.

Thus, the Lady of the Lake returns Sir Mordred to life. She tells Mordred she’s brought him back because she wants him to “go on a knightly quest” to “finish what [he] started” by killing King Arthur once and for all…or whatever has become of him since [she] took his dying vessel to Avalon. Knight’s Tale describes Avalon as “a reflection of the real Camelot,” which suggests the Camelot that Sir Mordred sees before him isn’t the real thing. Nevertheless, Sir Mordred must rebuild Camelot and reform the Knights of the Round Table to aid him on this quest.

The main point I’d put in Knight’s Tale’s favor is the fact that it has quite a few central mechanics in common with Darkest Dungeon. A few examples of these are the process by which you rebuild Camelot, how you treat your heroes’ battle wounds, and the fact that the deaths of heroes are permanent. All of these mechanics work quite well with each other. For example, you cannot restore your heroes’ vitality or treat their injuries until you’ve spent the gold and building resources to construct both a Hospice and a Cathedral. You can then further upgrade each building to improve its capabilities.

The Hospice restores heroes’ vitality over time, while the Cathedral heals more persistent injuries. The key phrase there is “over time.” When you send heroes for treatment in the Hospice and the Cathedral, they’ll need to be kept out of action for a certain number of missions to fully recover. You can either have them treated for free in exchange for keeping them sidelined for more missions, or speed up their treatment by paying a certain amount of gold. You can end a hero’s treatment early if you need them in battle, but there are risks to doing so.

The most obvious of these risks is that a hero will likely be noticeably weaker in battle if you end their treatment prematurely. There’s also the fact that you won’t be refunded if you spent gold to speed up a hero’s recovery process. This mechanic, combined with permanent hero deaths, means you’ll have to carefully consider whether you can afford to leave any of your knights out of the action long enough for them to fully heal without risking the well-being (and lives) of your other available knights. These decisions are often difficult, but Knight’s Tale is designed to be challenging.

As I alluded to, you can spend further resources to improve the efficiency of each new part of Camelot once you’ve built it. Things like the Hospice and Cathedral can be upgraded to make fully treating heroes take less time and to allow you to treat more knights at once. The Merchant and the Forge can be upgraded to provide higher-quality available purchases and equipment upgrades. As you might have guessed, this is all quite similar to the process of rebuilding and upgrading the Hamlet in Darkest Dungeon. Knight’s Tale has some interesting twists on certain common mechanics, however.

You can grant so-called “Titles” to your knights between missions. Part of this mechanic is being able to basically put certain knights “in charge” of certain areas of Camelot. You can name one of your knights the Hospitaller at the Hospice and Court Chandler at the Merchant, for example. Some knights have passive bonuses that make them particularly well-suited to these duties. Thankfully, giving any of your knights any of these titles doesn’t prevent them from still going on missions; their assigned duties can wait until they’ve returned from the fray. Giving titles to your knights can also affect their loyalty to you.

That’s particularly important because the amount of loyalty (or disloyalty) any knight has toward Sir Mordred and Camelot affects how well they perform in battle. Throughout Knight’s Tale’s campaign, you’ll frequently have to make decisions that affect Sir Mordred’s morality. Other knights with whom Sir Mordred can ally himself have different factors that alter their loyalty, like how well their alignment (good/neutral/evil) meshes with that of Sir Mordred. Knight’s Tale provides you with a “morality chart” that shows you how important decisions you’ve made have affected your alignment. This chart also summarizes which decisions you made, in case you’ve forgotten.

The vertical axis of the morality chart shows how close your decisions have brought Sir Mordred to being either a “Rightful Ruler” or a “Reckless Tyrant.” The morality chart’s horizontal axis shows how close Sir Mordred is to fully embracing either Christianity or “the Old Faith.” All these factors can affect the loyalty of your fellow knights. Where you fall on the morality chart at any given time can also grant you unique abilities and affect which knights are willing to join your new Round Table when you first meet them. That brings me to Knight’s Tale’s core gameplay loop.

You and your knights of the reformed Round Table use Camelot as a base of operations. From here, you can assemble a group of up to four characters to take on whatever the next mission might be. Some missions might require certain characters to be in the party to be completed. Unless such a requirement is in place, you don’t necessarily need to bring Sir Mordred on every mission. That’s why I said earlier that you “primarily” play as Sir Mordred rather than always playing as him.

During a mission, you can choose between either right-clicking to move or using the WASD keys whenever you’re out of combat. Regardless of which control scheme you prefer, Q and E rotate the camera, and left-click will interact with things like doors and treasure chests. When you enter combat, however, you can only use right-click to move and left-click to attack. I’ve had some difficulty having to switch control schemes in and out of combat, especially since I prefer to use WASD for movement. Still, you’ll likely get used to this given enough time.

Several bog-standard party-based RPG mechanics are present within Knight’s Tale. These include the fact that each hero has a limited amount of action points they can spend each turn, as well as things like flanking, taking cover, bonus-damage backstabs, and attacks of opportunity. This may seem like a small touch, but Knight’s Tale allows you to left-click an empty tile of the “battlefield grid” to have your currently selected character face that direction. This can be vital because it can prevent your knights from taking extra damage from enemies behind them. However, this mechanic can also be problematic if you’re not careful.

If you aren’t always accurate when clicking on your characters to select one of them, you can unintentionally cause a character to change the direction they’re facing. This can be a problem when you meant to click on a different character. That’s why it might be best if you stick to switching between your party members by clicking on their portraits on the left side of the screen. You can also have one or all of your characters end their turn while reserving any action points they haven’t yet spent.

Knight’s Tale will warn you if you attempt to end your turn while any of your characters haven’t spent any action points. Any action points a character reserves can then be spent on their next turn, or reserved again until they’re needed. This is particularly handy when you need to move a character a long distance, or when you can take advantage of one of your knights having enough action points to attack multiple times in one turn. Being able to land multiple attacks in one turn can be crucial when facing certain types of enemies.

Most knights you can control have three “health bars,” for lack of a better term: Armor, hit points, and vitality. Some of your characters don’t have armor, though. When they’re attacked, their armor will absorb as much of the incoming damage as possible. If they’re dealt more damage than their armor can handle, their armor will break, and the remaining damage will be dealt to their hit points, then to their vitality. When your characters’ vitality is damaged, they can sustain injuries that can only be treated in the Cathedral. When a character’s armor, HP, and vitality all reach 0, they die.

Armor and HP can be restored at campsites you can find scattered throughout missions. There are a few notable restrictions here, though: Campsites are single-use, and you have to choose between restoring a portion of your party’s missing HP or a portion of their broken armor. Exactly how much armor or HP can be restored at campsites depends on your chosen difficulty setting. I really like how this forces you to consider when to make camp and what’s most important to restore when you do. You’ll have to think carefully to make the most of your limited opportunities to recuperate and avoid “wasting” them.

With that all being said, I also dislike this aspect of Knight’s Tale because it can be confusing, especially for new players. Terms like “hit points” and “vitality” are often used in other games to refer to the same thing, so it’s odd having those designations mean two separate things you need to manage at the same time. If different names for these resources had been used instead, the process of keeping your knights alive and (relatively) healthy might have been much simpler to understand. This also causes an issue where the fact that “persistent injuries can only be treated at the Cathedral” makes less sense to me.

Knight’s Tale contains noticeable errors in its spelling and grammar. These mistakes don’t just affect in-game text, either: They also sometimes make spoken dialogue sound odd, at least to the ear of a native English speaker with little knowledge of other languages such as myself. Even though I quite enjoy King Arthur: Knight’s Tale, I have to treat it equally with all the other games I’ve reviewed. I can’t allow Knight’s Tale to leave the spotlight without pointing out this disappointing issue. In fairness, though, Knight’s Tale’s spelling and grammatical errors are nowhere near frequent or severe enough to be a deal breaker for me.

To conclude, several negative Steam reviews I’ve read mention that Knight’s Tale tends to crash regularly, sometimes even often enough to make potential players consider it unplayable. Knight’s Tale has crashed once for me, which was particularly inconvenient because that happened while I was in an area that disabled manual saving. Nevertheless, if you can deal with those potential hiccups and you’re interested in the idea of “XCOM meets Darkest Dungeon meets Arthurian legend,” I’m comfortable recommending King Arthur: Knight’s Tale. However, its rather steep price tag leads me to suggest waiting until a major sale before buying it.

A PC review key for King Arthur: Knight’s Tale was provided by NeocoreGames for this review.

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King Arthur: Knight's Tale

$44.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Well-implemented RPG and tactics elements.
• Interesting spin on Arthurian legend.
• Morality mechanics make your choices feel more impactful.

Cons

• It can be difficult to adjust to switching control methods.
• You frequently have to adjust the camera angle manually.
• Noticeable spelling and grammatical mistakes.