Knightshift preview

It's a good time to be a fan of real-time strategy--games that let you create a base of operations by quickly harvesting resources, building an army, and defeating your enemies before they can do the same to you. In fact, thanks to outstanding recent releases such as Warcraft III, Rise of Nations, and Age of Mythology, you could say there has never been a better time to be a fan of these games than right now--though great strategy games like these have also made things very competitive for developers. One game that will attempt to stand out from this already-tough crowd is KnightShift, from developer Reality Pump. Reality Pump, which is responsible for the Earth 2150 series, is no stranger to traditional real-time strategy games, but this time around, it's doing something different--something bovine. In this unusual real-time strategy and role-playing hybrid, wealth won't be measured in piles of treasure. It'll be measured in milk.

That's because the game's main resource will be milk, and it will be harvested from cows. Yes, milk. Yes, cows. KnightShift will take place in a fairy-tale world that will take a tongue-in-cheek approach to classical high fantasy. The game will feature two major gameplay types--a traditional real-time strategy mode and a role-playing game mode--both of which will include sizable single-player campaigns and multiplayer options. For instance, you'll play through much of the single-player campaign as a kidnapped prince who escapes from the bumbling wizard who kidnapped him when a breeze from an open window turns a page in the wizard's spell book, causing him to mistakenly cast a teleport spell that whisks you away to freedom, rather than the really awful magic spell he intended for you.

Unfortunately, in the real-time strategy single-player campaign, freedom is a long way from home. As the long-lost prince John, your goal in the campaign is to recover your royal armor and weapons so you can be recognized as the true ruler of the land. The campaign begins with a series of tutorial missions that should help ease new players into the game's conventional real-time strategy gameplay, which includes building bases, group-selecting units, and ordering them into formations. In the single-player campaign, you'll gradually acquire an army of soldiers that will all have individual names and some vital statistics, as well as the ability to gain experience levels and use items to improve their performance in battle--and in several missions, you'll have the option to carry over your favorites into the next mission.

The role-playing mode in KnightShift resembles Blizzard Entertainment's hack-and-slash game Diablo. In this part of the game, you'll generate a character from one of eight different classes, including knights, barbarians, and wizards, and adjust various statistics, including strength and stamina, using the character points that you receive each time you gain a level. You'll also collect gold from fallen enemies that you can use to purchase weapons, armor, and other items from merchants. In the meantime, you'll play through a hack-and-slash single-player adventure with an entourage of soldiers that you'll control like a squad of real-time strategy units, so they won't have inventories or experience levels, but they will be able to improve their abilities by picking up magic items along the way.

Both the strategy and role-playing modes will have full multiplayer options. The multiplayer version of the game's role-playing mode will resemble Diablo's hack-and-slash cooperative play, and the multiplayer version of the real-time strategy mode will feature individual skirmish maps that you can play online against your friends, against computer-controlled opponents, or some combination of the two. Though the game will have only one playable side, that of Prince John and his host of medieval fantasy soldiers, you can expect to see at least a few unusual units on the battlefield alongside the swordsmen and archers you'd expect. For instance, in true real-time strategy fashion, you'll need to build structures to recruit different military units, and in order to fund this construction, you'll need to milk your cows using cowherds--bright-eyed young lads who increase milk production and provide other miscellaneous bonuses to your bovine friends.

Cows will grow larger and fatter as they graze, and they'll automatically move on to greener pastures if they begin to exhaust the grass in a single area. And once you've gotten the battle started, you can recruit mundane soldiers accompanied by broom-riding witches (who shoot damaging lightning bolts that deal siege-based damage to buildings) and the mother-in-law unit, who uses her nagging ability to speed up production and can also capture enemy buildings by chasing out any garrisoned enemies with her trusty rolling pin.

Though KnightShift's humorous approach to high fantasy may seem like a gimmick, the game's unusual combination of real-time strategy and role-playing game modes should help set it apart. The game is scheduled for release later this year.