Once Upon a Knight – PC – Review – PC – Review

Once Upon a Knight advertises itself as a sort of lighthearted spoof of serious RTS and RPG games, one that purports to offer solid gameplay comparable to other games in the genres, yet with humorous digs at sacred cows.

The premise is basically this: The good Prince John, who every normal person loved, was, of course, hated by all evil persons. After being banished to another dimension by one of these evil-doers, he languished in limbo for several years. Finally, a magician named Gallus rescues him in the hope of restoring the kingdom and defeating evil forever. Prince John won’t find this task very easy, however.

There are two modes of play, RTS and RPG. The RTS mode is probably the most in-depth, as to the amount of things to do and the story line. This is set-up in a campaign mode of three campaigns, with innumerable missions for each one. The first campaign features easy missions at the beginning, to introduce the main concepts of the game. Prince John will be given certain goals to reach, mostly of the “go there, do this” type, which will introduce resource production, unit management and combat. Resource production is limited to one resource, milk cows (not the sacred kind). Yep, this is the basis of the whole kingdom’s economy. Managing these herds is super easy, it just requires building cowsheds and occasionally moving cows around to better grazing. Each building or unit requires a set amount of milk for purchase. And folks, that’s about it on the building management scene.

Combat management is a bit more complex, mainly because of some difficulties in battle planning. The main forces consist of infantry and range soldiers. The range soldiers are great from a distance, but unfortunately they’re incredibly weak up close. They do tend to hang back a little, but since the infantry frequently charges way ahead, they’re totally unprotected from flank attacks. Keys on the keyboard can be assigned for unit group selection, which offers a way to select all of the archers and move away, but this is difficult to implement in the thick of battle. What usually happens is that most of these guys are the first to die, thus making it hard to ever build up this group’s stats, as most of them are new each mission.

Building each soldier’s experience points requires collecting weapons upgrades for each soldier, plus plenty of fighting. If they survive, they’ll be stronger, better combatants. Some missions’ successes depend on having a strong army at the end, which can be hard to achieve if there is any underground dungeon crawling involved beforehand. These dungeons are literally overrun with hordes of enemies, and with the narrow tunnels combined with darkened unexplored areas, makes keeping the range soldiers alive a dicey proposition at best. Magical healing spots are plentiful, but getting the range soldiers to them is awkward, as only one can stand on one spot at a time; while one is being directed to a healing spot, the other ones are dying like flies. For missions with these long dungeon crawls, having just infantry units is probably the best bet.

Having the ability to plan out some of the battle’s movements beforehand would have been handy, instead of having to wing it all on the fly, but I guess that is why they call it Real Time.

The RTS game is pretty combat intensive and light on the resource management, especially in the first missions. Just when a player is getting some building done, he/she is yanked away on another mission which usually involves lots of enemies, and no building.

The RPG mode also features a good dose of combat, but not quite as much as the RTS mode. Here, players will spend most of their time on long, involved quests and upgrading Prince John and the occasional NPC who’s joined up temporarily. While the battles are not as intensive, Poor old Prince John can’t handle a pack of enemies by himself in the beginning, so sometimes it’s better to just try to run away from danger, at least until he’s built up his stats somewhat. These quests are pretty hokey, and fail to generate any interest in their outcome, besides having to succeed in order to move on to the next one.

The interface is easy to implement and understand, with good access to basic functions on a bottom menu and top menu. The units can be selected by either double-clicking on their character icon on the side index, or by hitting an assigned number key. There are literally tons of keyboard commands available for the characters, but most players aren’t going to remember all these commands, and just will need to concentrate on the most important ones. Building is very easy, too, and just requires clicking on the unit/building desired and most of the time a worker will amble over and begin building. If too far away, they can be manually assigned to the building by clicking on them and then clicking on the building. Buildings can be upgraded easily, too, for better unit weapons. The mouse movement is pretty sluggish, however, at least on my 2.4 GHz, and can be a tad annoying.

Visually, the game looks good. The characters are drawn crisply and move smoothly, and the backgrounds are detailed. To facilitate game speed and mouse movement, I chose the lowest graphic settings and everything still looked good. I ran the game on a 2.4GHz, which is above the recommended speed, but still experienced some sluggishness in gameplay on higher settings.

The humor that is supposed to permeate this game falls flat for some reason. Every word in mission advancement conversations has “eth” added to the end, which is a little funny at first. The soldiers all have modern accents and say common expressions while being ordered around like “meat and veg”, but again, this isn’t hysterically funny. The milk resource isn’t really that humorous, either. Some of the character descriptions are pretty funny, but this doesn’t have much relation to actually playing the game.

I enjoyed playing the RTS mode the best of the two, because there was more to do and manage. Having more emphasis on building/resource management and less on combat would have suited me better, though. A better way to manage multiple units in combat from a distance would have been appreciated as well, but that may be just the nature of the RTS beast. I tend to gravitate toward turn-based strategy games, so I may be doing the combat a slight injustice. I didn’t enjoy having all my soldiers die in tunnels, and not be able to defeat the boss at the end because of this. After redoing a mission dungeon crawl many times over, I began to be irritated.

The RPG mode feels tacked on, and doesn’t really offer much depth as compared to other RPGs. Prince John’s stats can be upgraded, items can be collected and other features pertinent to RPGs are also present, but the quests themselves are boring and don’t offer much sense. The skirmish mode offers a chance to improve Prince John’s skills against the computer, but this mode isn’t much fun.