Knights Inc. Review

The Play Store doesn’t have a whole lot of management games, let alone medieval-themed ones, so I was intrigued by up-and-coming studio Kimeric Labs’ debut game Knights Inc. It’s being billed as a scenario in which “capitalism has hit the Middle Ages,” and being a bit of nut for medievalism, I booted it up with great anticipation. I should have saved my time and just read a Little Golden Book about King Arthur instead.

In Knights Inc., you play an enterprising business owner who hires a group of knights to do mercenary tasks around the realm. For whatever reason, these knights have chosen to apply to your start-up on their own—aren’t there crusades to fight and nobles to serve? Surely feudalism didn’t just collapse overnight—and it’s your task to find them enough jobs to cover everyone’s salary each week, along with the ever-rising weekly taxes. (The tax system makes no sense, as it just gets incrementally higher each week with no regard for income, but hey—this is medieval capitalism. There are bound to be some bugs in the system at this point.)

Each knight has one of three strengths: they’re either strong, nimble, or wise. Based on whatever word is written in red in a job description, you can kind of tell what kind of knight would be suited for a task. Or you can just see which knight in your payroll has the best statistical chance of success. Either way works.

Here’s the part where I started to lose interest. I wrote about this a while back while playing Mighty Dungeons, but I’ll say it again for you guys in the cheap seats: if you’re going to make an adventure game without showing any adventure on-screen, your text needs to be super good. In this case, Kimeric was going for humor, which is smart. But there are only three or four quests for each difficulty level, so you’re going to be seeing a lot of the same vaguely funny jokes over and over again. Worse, spelling errors and homonym mixups are everywhere, along with incomplete quest descriptions. I saw one quest that still had “{1} and {2}” in the place of actual names. It’s monumentally sloppy work, and glaring—how did they miss these errors? It’s not like there’s a mountain of text to wade through. They could have spell-checked everything in half an hour.

(Side note: truth be told, the part where I started to lose interest was way before this, when I looked at the scenario list and saw “Lancelot Family.” In this mode, the object is to get “all five knights from the Round Table at the end of a day: Lancelot, Arthur, Merlin [definitely not a knight], Mortred [sic], and Gallahad [sic].” After reading that, I had a feeling of what I was in for.)

Now, if the devs had been too busy making their visuals shiny to bother with basic proofreading, I could have at least given them some grudging kudos. But the animation isn’t very interesting to look at—all your knights do is stand in a room, pulsing slightly until you assign them a task. Then they disappear. They don’t even have the decency to use a door or walk off-screen. The character designs are about as entertaining as the missions: funny, until you realize there are only a fistful of them randomly shuffled around. Plus, there are only two rooms (and thus screens) to look at, total. As it turns out, the most amusing thing in the entire game is your de facto avatar, a paper-pushing knight at the “front desk” whose breastplate sports a small black tie. He spends his days drumming his gauntleted fingers idly upon the table, nodding off and presumably dreaming of the days when he rescued princesses in some other, more dynamic game. His ennui is palpable, and I soon learned what it was like to truly be him.

But the worst part of Knights Inc. is how easy it is. I could give this a pass if the gameplay itself were at least difficult, but the toughest part was getting my business off the ground in the first place. After the first two weeks, I had enough gold to pay everyone and cover my taxes ahead of schedule. This dramatically reduced any tension the game had. I found myself trying to beat scenarios I wasn’t even playing, increasing the difficulty independent of anything the game asked me to accomplish. When I have higher standards for my own performance than a computer, something has gone terribly wrong.

Overall, I can see what Kimeric was going for with Knights Inc. In a different world, I might even have enjoyed it. But that world is one where the gameplay has more depth, the graphics have more action, and—most importantly—the text isn’t annoying to read. That would’ve been much more fun than the game I wound up playing, which was just a dragon-sized disappointment.