Knights of Honor Review

It seems I'm making up for lost time, here's the second post for today.

In a recent surge of nostalgia I got the itch to play Knights of Honor (KoH), I played this game when it was released, about 2 years ago, and I really enjoyed it.
Then time passed and other games came along and I kinda forgot about this game, but now I'm back.

KoH is a real time strategy game, which simulates you being a king of a European country in the middle ages.
This is not a C&C or Warcraft kind of strategy game, it focuses more on the ruling, diplomacy, population control and war strategy part of ruling a country.
The goal of the game is to become the most powerful county in Europe and the most powerful ruler.

As always this is an opinion review and not a specific details review so here are the categories.

The Good:
Unit control - In this game you control 9 units at most, as you progress through the game, these units come and go for some particular reasons.
This is a great design choice, since it limits the player with the amount of control he/she has on the game, and it raises the level of difficulty of the game.
But it also lets the player choose their game style, if your goal is to conquer every country you'll invest in marshals, on the other hand you can win the game with trade alone (merchants), etc.
So this way you're both challenged and intrigued at the same time.

Recourse Collection - Finally a strategy game where you don't have to micro-manage all the resources.
In this game you control provinces, each province has some areas it controls, and on these areas a farm or church or mine can be built, and these structures give you the majority of resources in the game.
The good thing here is that you don't control the construction of these structures, I believe it's auto-generated by the computer, you can only affect the already existing structures in a minor way, by building structures in your province.
The only resource you control entirely is trade goods, which includes money.
Now some people will say it's a bad thing, but as you play the game you understand the meaning of the sentence "Heavy is the head that wears the crown".
You will quickly understand that you do not have the time to micro-manage every little detail in your kingdom, especially when you conquer a lot of provinces and you have to control them all simultaneously, with limited personnel.

Spies - one of my favorite features in the game.
Spies are done in a very clever way in this game, since each country can only control 9 units, you have to constantly hire and fire these units, here is where the spy comes in.
You hire a spy and wait for him to be hired by the country your sent him to in a certain position, each position has its advantages, for instance if the spy is hired as a spy in another country, you can actually assassinate the king, which is really cool.

Sound - a really nice feature in the game is the soundtrack, it is pretty loopy, but you get into the game's ambiance.


The Bad:
Graphics - for a game that was made in 2007, you'd expect a bit more finish to the graphics.
It's basically a 2D game, with 3D models used for sprites.
Although this does not affect the gameplay, it could have been nice to get a bit more animations even in the 2D world.

Computer Power - since I played mostly against the computer, I can honestly say, the computer tends to take advantage of its position.
As you start the game, the computer randomizes the diplomatic relations between the countries.
Sometimes you can start the game when you are at war with all the countries around you, and the computer starts sending troops instantly, before you even had the chance to breathe, let alone buy some decent units.
This could have easily been solved with some imaginative coding.

The Stupid:
Lead the Fight - in this game you have the option to get into a certain fight and control the forces by yourself, warcraft-style.
This feature is stupid, I've must have used it once or twice.
Since the game has so much to offer aside from this, I couldn't even muster the power to lead a fight, and when I finally tried it my results were a lot worse than the computer's.
It seems like the studio put a lot of effort into that portion of the game, and it seems as though they shouldn't have.
It's like a friend that brings you a gift and you say "oh, you shouldn't have", but in this case you actually mean it.
I imagine that the studio did not want to alienate the RTS core gamers, but I think those gamers are not the target audience for this game.

In conclusion, I give this game a 9 out of 10.
I really enjoyed trying to conquer every country in Europe, and I suggest you do the same.

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Now playing: Dream Theater - A Change Of Seasons
via FoxyTunes