King Arthur: A Knight's Tale was released last week so I have switched over to that game for a while. I've only barely played long enough to get out of Act 1, where the pre-purchase demo cut out.
THe main story is that following the well known story of King Arthur and his fight with Mordred, the Lady of the Lake attempted to save King Arthur but only managed to make a monster. The former King Arthur and the denizens of Hell were unleased on Avalon.
In an effort to right the wrongs, the Lady brought back Mordred to slay King Arthur again. Through the game you are tasked with rebuilding Camelot and reforming the Round table with the heros or villains of the classic story, depending on your choice of play through.
Throughout the game you will be faced with numerous moral choices that will determine the fate of the reborn Mordred. The two dimensions of moral choice are Rightful -vs- Tyrant and Pagan -vs- Christian. Based on how you progress will unlock various quests to recruit new heroes. If you go far enough down the Pagan axis you could unlock Morgan Le Fay, Far enough down the Rightful path you can unlock Sir Lancelot, etc. Even without the Moral unlocks there are a lot of minor characters that you will come across to recruit with varying skill sets, so you don't need to feel tied to specific decision trees unless you want specific heroes unlocked.
THe Heroes in teh game follow a general class system with Defender, Marksman (Archer), Champion (2H melee), Vanguard (think assassin), Healer, Mage ... and while every hero in a class will serve generally the same purpose, each hero only has a set number of skills to unlock and develop which makes each one kind of unique. For instance, one marksman might get poison arrow, fire arrow skill and light armor, while another only has poison arrow, but can wear medium armor.
Then there are a whole boat load os random-ish gear that drops from chests in-mission that you can use to accetuate the skill sets you choose for your heroes.
Combat is more like a 2 dimensional chess board, or old table-top, where each fight comes down to timing, starting placement and coordination.
The game is mission based, and each mission is a series of set encounters that you trigger by walking into them. THe missions are sort of non-linear this way, but there are some missions that funnel you through encounters to unlock final fights, then others where you can just go straight to the final fight for a quick win... the later tend not to be story missions, though.
My first play through is channeling Mordred through a full reform, taking him down the Righful Christian path. There in lies my first real quible...
Mordred, being a tabula rasa of sorts, is classified as "Neutral", as such he generally has a full set of wishy washy dialogue options. The problem is that it would make sense if they changed dialogue based on your morality choices, but so far that hasn't happened. Basically the point of the morality in teh game is to unlock team members that play nicely togther.
My pros and cons...
Pros:
- It turn based combat, which I always like.. not really X-Com, something more like a table-top experience
- Color Coded loot for the little endorphin rushes.
- Story is interesting And it has a lot of replay potential based on random gear and the variety of moral choices
- A fun alternate reality trip into the story of King Arthur.
- Plenty of Min/Max goodness that rewards you for thinking carefully about your character builds.
Cons:
- The writing is pretty hit and miss. Some seems written by professional writers, other stuff sounds like it was written by children... like they fired the writing staff before the dialogue was completed.
- The aforementioned moral choices do have as far reaching an effect on the game as, say, a Fallout game might.
- The rate of moral choices seems a bit lopsided, favoring the Rightful/Tyrant axis, though not so much yet to rul out RNG
I'm only a few missions into Act 2, and have only unlocked one of the special characters on the Rightful axis.. can't really say he is particularly more useful than the guy I have in that role (2H melee).. but I guess that's the breaks when you have crafted one unit from level 1 versus being handed a level 8 that was designed by the developer.
All told, a rather fun game. We'll see by the end of this play through if I still like it enough to try a new moral path play through with those character unlocks.