Even with your knights assigned to help your kingdom you will do much of the work yourself. There’s a lot going on here under the hood and you have to listen carefully to make sure that your kingdom is still purring along. The game is very detailed (after all, how many Medieval strategy games require you to keep inflation in check?), and the information that you need can be hard to find and it can take some time before you understand how things affect each other in the game. Detailed summary screens would have been a valuable addition to the game, but as it stands it takes patience and persistence to get a snapshot of the state of your kingdom.

A castle under siege.

In addition to the main view, the game provides a political map view. Filters can be applied to show things like alliances and religion at a glance, and the map is quite useful in helping you get a look at the state of the world around you. It would have been nice if the game would have let you conduct diplomacy from this screen as well, but as it stands these actions are all buried elsewhere.

When armies meet on the field of battle, the game switches to a battle view to let you command your armies. The battles take place in real time and are pretty straight-forward – you can control unit formations and designate which enemy units should be attacked, but that’s about it. It’s not all that exciting to tell the truth and you’ll probably soon begin to just let the computer auto-resolve the battles for you.

The AI in Knights of Honor plays a strong and aggressive game. Once you learn your way around the game you’ll appreciate the challenge and the way it keeps you on guard at all times, but be prepared for many a defeat in the early going. The tough AI and steep learning curve mean Knights of Honor is strictly for strategy gaming veterans and not for casual gamers. Knights of Honor is very detail-oriented and can provide a compelling and rewarding experience to gamers who are also so.

The game’s graphics are a throwback to the days of 2D, but to its credit the colors are bright and colorful. You don’t really lose much by the lack of 3D graphics as far as gameplay is concerned, so this is not much of a knock against the game. The one graphical oddity of the game comes as a result of the inclusion of a day/night cycle. Things get to be pretty difficult to see at night and it feels out of place considering the scale of the game.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 80%.  Knights of Honor is a detailed simulation of economics, warfare, and diplomacy in the Middle Ages, but remember that the devil is in the details.

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