Knights and Peasants Review

My soldiers and I are about to lay siege on an enemy territory protected by a treacherous looking castle surrounded by a moat and thousands of villagers. We slay the villagers but lose a lot of the men and begin to rally for the attack on the mighty fortress in front of us. Is that what Knights and Peasants is all about? No.

Knights plays a lot like a mix between a real-time strategy and a turn based affair. The gameplay is slow, can become monotonous and doesn’t get the old ticker pumping any faster than it was before. The game takes place on one main screen with other tasks, such as recruiting men and constructing buildings, being dealt with on the sidebar. The object of the game, of course, is to take over all the enemy territories.

Like I said earlier, gameplay is slow. It takes about 30 seconds to make one man and then it can take him minutes to get him to his destination. Not only that, but the soldier variety is, well, limited. Knights and Peasants (get it?) are the only types of units available for production. Building types don’t diversify either. Farms (peasants), Castles (Knights) and Defense Works are the only types available to the gamer.

Control is bad also. If I want to move just my knights to one location and keep my peasants where they are I have to have phenomenal luck, because everything seems completely random. If there is a feature to move units more efficiently, it may as well not have been implemented because I doubt people have found it.

The visuals are terrible. No “ooh, wow, look at that� here. The graphics consist of bland looking territories and dots representing men. Tiny icons display where building types are located also. The sound is also lacking. And by lacking I mean nonexistent.

The game isn’t as horrible as it seems on paper. I actually came back to it enough times that my girlfriend got mad at me for playing “that yellow game� again. While the gameplay is unrefined, the visuals and sound department are severely lacking and control could improve a great deal. Though, not all is bad in the land of Knights, replay value here is the key. I’ve been playing this game for several weeks now and I never think that the game is horrible; I just wish it had gone through more beta testing.

In the end, I cannot recommend a purchase. Try the demo and if it is your thing then go ahead. To the common gamer yearning for a strategy game, try Warfare Inc. or Aggression. Although, I am hoping for a new release to fix some of the problems I had with the game, it seems as if it is still being updated.