Once Upon a Knight

Rating:
Summary: Amazing Potential, Sadly it Fails in Gameplay
Review: I really wanted Once Upon a Knight to be a great game. I love RPGs and I love strategy games. This seemed like the perfect combination of genres, with cow-humor too! Unfortunately, it fell short.

First, some of the good points. The graphics are really impressive, sort of a cross between Black & White, WarCraft III and Nox. You have water with reflections, waving trees, very detailed friends and enemies.

Gameplay is also very much a cross between Nox and WarCraft III. There's a strategy game where you go around gathering weapons and armor, watching your health and killing the bad guys. There's also a RPG game where you ... go around gathering weapons and armor, watching your health and killing the bad guys - while gaining experience. The maps and story are pretty much the same.

The cut scenes have amazingly well done graphics which add to gameplay. The sound is quite good when it works properly, and there are little touches that show a sense of humor behind the scenes.

With all of these things going for the game, it should have been one I LOVED. This is about perfect for my interests. But despite trying several times to get into enjoying this game, each time I walked away in frustration and anger. How could the game suck so badly??

First off, whoever QAed this game did a pretty bad job. My machine here is a 3 GHz machine with a great video card, 1 gig RAM and plays hundreds of games without a glitch. When I put Once Upon a Knight on it, the game CRAWLED and mouse movement was incredibly jerky. I had to crank down all settings and put the resolution at one too low for my monitor to draw well to get it to play even reasonably. Even so, there was mouse lag and jerky video. This problem was even worse on other machines I tried it on - all between 2 GHz and 3 GHz.

Next, the game just wasn't very involving at all. There are so many games I've played - Dungeon Siege, Diablo, Baldur's Gate, etc. - where the story and gameplay drew me in and I was really interested in continuing to play. I would stay up all night to get to another level. With Once Upon a Knight, I had to force myself to keep plodding forward. It just didn't seem interesting at all.

I have been a member of the SCA for years and love medieval stories and activities. But the incessant 'I mustest telleth thee why thee musteth goeth on a questeth' was bordering on torture. 'Archaic speech' works really well in some contexts - but they did it so incredibly poorly, misusing parts of speech and using poor grammar to boot - that it was like trying to read L337 SP33CH to play a game.

The default settings for the game added to its unplayability. They start with dialogue boxes off - but the dialogue is poorly done and half the time you can't tell what the people are saying. Plus the default music volume drowns out the speech. I've already mentioned what the default graphics settings do to gameplay.

It seems like such an incredible shame to me, that a basic idea that was so great, combined with graphics that had such potential, ended up combining to create a game that was so unenjoyable. It really is a prime example how having a great foundation in a game means nothing if plot, QA and testing aren't done well. Having brilliant reflections in water are fine, but if you have no incentive to walk the landscape, they'll never be seen.

Rating:
Summary: Once Upon a Great Game!
Review: I work at Atari (for the QA dept) and have spent some time on Once Upon a Knight.
It's a great, great game.
First and foremost, Once Upon a Knight is a Real Time Strategy (RTS) game. In my opinion, it's better than the other RTS games out there - and I have played a few.
The game comes with several maps for RTS play, but it also has an editor that allows the user to create his own maps.
But there's more...
Once Upon a Knight is also a Roleplaying/Adventure game. The game includes several campaigns that play as an RPG - which the user can play solo or in a group with some friends in multiplayer.
So bascially, you have two games in one - a great RTS and a very good RPG.
Visually, this game is amazing. To date, I have not seen a game with better graphics than Once Upon a Knight. Another strong point is the "humor" element of Once Upon a Knight - the characters are very entertaining. It's the game that everyone in the QA department wanted to test.
If you like Real Time Strategy games, I highly recomend Once Upon a Knight.

Rating:
Summary: I'm ready to launch my laptop over this one!
Review: It's not the laptop's fault. It's that this game is so aggravating. It's a cute premise, and I held out hope for it.

The campaign was ok. As others have said, it's pretty linear, and gets dull after a while.

The RPG section was ok while I was playing a male character. When I changed to playing a female character, it was like being drop-kicked into the middle of Frat Row on Beer Bash night while wearing a miniskirt. My female character gets hit on, gets stupid things said to her, says really stupid things (gawd-awful 'thou' lingo not counted), and it gets old, fast.

Not to mention that the game messages were not looked over by anyone who had a native-level grasp of the English language. It was charming at first, now it's just obnoxious. If you're looking for a time-killer, this could possibly be ok. Be warned though, your blood pressure may rise.

Rating:
Summary: Wow! This game is awesome!
Review: Once Upon a knight is a fantastic game. The graphics are truly unbelievable. Everything looks so good! The reflections on the water are the best I have ever seen. There is so much gampeplay included in this package. There is a full Role Playing game and a full RTS game. Plus the online skirmish mode is a blast. If you do not believe me just download the demo and you will see just how good this game is! I highly recommend this game to EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: Not bad, BUT...
Review: The game installed and ran smoothly on my 2.7Gig machine. The only slowdowns were during the Autosaves. Graphics are decent if not spectacular and the manual is complete and well written.

Having said that, the game is boring as heck. The campaign is linear, with little choice about what to do or where to go next. As someone else mentioned, the horribly mangled Elizebethian dialect would get you thrown out of most Ren Faires. Combat options are limited to: Run forward and hack until your health bar drops into the red, then run away, or stand off and shoot arrows, chuck spears, or shoot fireballs and hope nobody gets close to you. I found it a pretty pointless hack-and-slash where I could cere less about the outcome and even less about the depressingly one-dimensional characters.

Rating:
Summary: Not bad, BUT...
Review: The game installed and ran smoothly on my 2.7Gig machine. The only slowdowns were during the Autosaves. Graphics are decent if not spectacular and the manual is complete and well written.

Having said that, the game is boring as heck. The campaign is linear, with little choice about what to do or where to go next. As someone else mentioned, the horribly mangled Elizebethian dialect would get you thrown out of most Ren Faires. Combat options are limited to: Run forward and hack until your health bar drops into the red, then run away, or stand off and shoot arrows, chuck spears, or shoot fireballs and hope nobody gets close to you. I found it a pretty pointless hack-and-slash where I could cere less about the outcome and even less about the depressingly one-dimensional characters.

Rating:
Summary: An RPG stripped of all RPG qualities
Review: The graphics, gameplay, and sounds are amazing, no problem there. The camera angles are a little tight sometimes making it difficult to see what you're getting yourself into but they are not nausiating or too terribly annoying. The environments and music really set the mood. Even the storyline is very interesting. However, if you're looking for a game that you can play for a long time or really get into, this isn't it.

I was excited for the first 2-3 hours, then it just got repetitive. You walk around hacking, slashing, or bashing your enemies to bits. You find new weapons once in a while and you can learn new combos or prayers once in a while. I just found it disappointing that they decided to stop here. This could have been a great role-playing game if they had incorporated RPG elements such as stats, xp, levelling up, skills, character classes, etc. But as it stands, you can only play a knight, you use either a sword, a mace, or an axe, and your "skills" are combos, which make the game feel a little more like a medieval Mortal Kombat in a 3D environment. Not to mention that the number of combos and prayers are very limited thus making the game that much more repetitive. It just lacks some depth.

If you're not looking for an RPG but just a linear hack & slash where you don't have to do anything but kill enemies, this is a good game. If you're looking for an RPG, this isn't the game for you.