Hands-on: KnightShift

With KnightShift, German developer Reality Pump is following up on its experience with the Earth 2150 real-time strategy series. But leaving behind Earth 2150's sci-fi setting, KnightShift takes place in a medieval fantasy world that's a little outside fantasy conventions. KnightShift defies expectations with its own blend of Monty Python-esque humor, Shakespearean satire, and peculiar lighthearted gameplay elements.

Whereas other real-time strategy franchises have used the likes of gold, lumber, coal, iron, crystals, or gas for their harvestable resources, KnightShift's economy centers around milk. The milk comes from cows, which meander about the map feeding. Cows, by gobbling up portions of grass off the map itself, accumulate milk and then offload it at a milk shed. Milk can then be spent in the conventional manner to construct buildings and create units, or it can be stored for later use.

How milk allows the construction of buildings isn't exactly clear. The game keeps the collection of real raw materials in the background, instead of forcing you to find and collect lumber or other materials. Since milk is more or less the game's currency, the simple one-resource economic model helps limit micromanagement in the game.

The cows display a kind of playful ridiculousness that's characteristic of KnightShift's tone. It's amusing to watch the cows--each of which has its own name, like Gertrude or Martha--go about their business with a kind of bemused innocence. In the main campaign, dialogue is written with an overdose of Shakespearean staples like "thee," "thou," and "art," and the terms are overused to the point of being funny. The campaign itself focuses on the journey of Prince John, who has just returned home after being stuck in the void for many years. The humor falls along the same lines as the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the game takes every opportunity to poke fun at its medieval world.

The units in KnightShift play a role in the comedy. One available unit is the mother-in-law, which, without much explanation, doubles the building speed of all workers within range. The cowherd, a young child, doubles the speed with which cows produce milk. And just like the cows, each unit has its own unique name, like Sly or Fabian. In all, available units range from workers, cows, and cowherds and traditional combat units like warriors and spearmen, to fantastic flying or teleporting magic-using wizards.

KnightShift makes some other changes to the standard RTS format, too. The game ties the number of units that can be built directly into the number of structures built to support the unit type. For example, instead of units being housed in a universal building or farm, as in other real-time strategy games, cows and cowherds are housed in one particular type of building, while spearmen reside in an entirely separate building. Therefore, if you're looking to build more units, you will have to build the appropriate building to house them.

The game's interface differs from RTS conventions in other ways. Specifically, the construction interface, with its four tabs split between units and buildings, is always visible and allows unit construction to be commanded from anywhere on the map. But production is still tied to the buildings themselves, so the more buildings you have, the more units you can build at once. Because all units are built from the various construction tabs, one nice gameplay refinement is that you can set all following units of that type to join a specific numbered group of units or to join existing groups.

In keeping with the craze of adding role-playing elements to strategy games, KnightShift's units can find and equip weapons, armor, or other upgrades dispersed randomly around the map at the start of a game. As the game progresses, more random upgrades appear, signaled by a message, which can get nearby players into a race to get the upgrade first. The persistent upgrades, like swords or shields, are equipped by the unit that finds them, but they can also be unequipped and transferred to others.

KnightShift attempts to add an uncommon lightheartedness to a genre filled with games that take their warlike content seriously. We'll see how well Reality Pump succeeds with this unusual premise when KnightShift is released next March.