3.5/5 ★ – sirvalkyerie's review of King Arthur: Knight's Tale.

I don't think I've ever played a game this *good*. And I do mean that kind of pejoratively? There's absolutely nothing wrong with this game. There's just nothing that sends it over the top. If you like the genre and/or the setting, you'll probably really like it. If you're indifferent about either, I'm not sure you'll see the charm in the game but it's not like you'd find it to be bad or underbaked. It's a pretty standard TTRPG with hero style units. Like a Final Fantasy Tactics or an Expeditions: Rome. In fact the latter is what I think it plays most like. Nothing wrong with that. Expeditions is a good game. Does King Arthur: Knight's Tale do anything better or meaningfully different? Not really. Each hero unit you have has an abundance of skills and earn skillpoints and level ups. The skills aren't entirely unique. Each hero comes from a class (think mage, tank, barbarian, archer etc). Any hero from any class largely has the same skills available to them and wears the same armors and accessories (you collect loot throughout the game). How you unlock certain heroes versus other certain heroes can vary. Some heroes have quests related to them. They're all from Arthurian Legend which is great. But they're same same in a variety of ways. And this is partly because if any of them die in battle, they're perma-dead just like Expeditions: Rome. Combat is grid-based standard TRPG fare with spells and AoEs and the like. No consumables, really aside from some health pots. You have a base-building function that unlocks extra stuff in your castle, Camelot. There's some minor party dialogue and dynamics with a few choices here and there. The game is moreorless 100% combat. And that's all there is. That's the game. It's fun. Combat is reasonably engaging and heroes have skills that synchronize well with themselves and other heroes. Combat engagements are mostly straightforward and difficulty feels fair. Some encounters are really quite hard and while you need to appropriately level for them there are not easy ways to get extra levels or farm XP. So you'll be using a similar group of heroes most of the time for most encounters which, if you've picked poorly, can make some of them even harder. The game reasonably expects you'll be losing a good number of your heroes in the game so it has a pretty expansive roster that you can only ever use a fraction of. And on the hardest difficulty I only lost two heroes in the entire run. So I had more heroes than I could use or level. And plenty of them were relatively redundant with one another. It felt like I didn't get a great chance to get to know many of them and many of them had very little utility to them if not used in battle. Aside from too many heroes, there was far too much loot. The game showers you in loot, most of which is repetitive and kinda useless. It's the game's main gold faucet, as you can sell your loot and use the gold to upgrade aspects of the castle. But the game's real economy bottleneck is in the building resources, which you'll never get enough of to build building upgrades in a timely fashion. Meanwhile because of the reliability of the gold faucet and not enough gold sinks I pretty much permanently had like 15,000 gold (which is way more than enough to buy anything in the game). Poor roster management and economy aside, my biggest complaint with the game is the maps. Sure the combat felt a little samey by the end and some encounters boiled down to just killing 40 of the same thing or spending 6 turns hitting an inanimate object that has a health bar but all of that was enjoyable enough aside from poor map design. The maps were winding with fake walls or conveniently fallen trees that require you to route minutes in another direction to get around them. Sometimes expected pathing was so hidden or obtuse that it took 5-10 real life minutes of trotting around a map I'd already cleared to find the tiny walkway I needed to take to trigger the final fight, or what have you. The minimap is also no help as it was nearly entirely illegible. Shaded areas that pretty clearly signal they cannot be traversed on the minimap are completely walkable in-game. The incongruity of it all often made exploration far more of a pain than anything enjoyable. Especially when the reward for exploration was most usually 29 gold and some loot I would never need. The production quality is high though I did find some maps or textures to be a bit too 'muddy' looking. The cutscenes were nice. Mordred's voice actor did a fairly good job and the Lady of the Lake was pretty good too despite looking like she suffered from mandibular hypoplasia. I did find the story mostly enjoyable and the boss fights were quite good and reasonably memorable. Combat was engaging and the fights felt fair. That's about everything you can ask of a tactical RPG. It was good. I'd recommend it. It was fun. It was not my favorite game. It's not one I'd go out of my way to suggest people play. But I have a hard time imagining that just about anyone would play this and walk away unsatisfied. It could not be a more competent game if it tried. It's just really, really solid. Take that for what you will. But I've played far worse games for three times as long as the 40 hours I spent in Avalon with Lancelot, Mordred, Morgana Le Fay and Merlin.