Once Upon a Knight

by Atari

Product Features

• Two games in one: RTS action and RPG adventure
• Over 20 missions & hundreds of quests
• Creepy creatures, battling bandits and marauding monsters
• An easy-to-use game editor for creating original maps and campaigns
• For 1 or more players over LAN or Internet

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000C86MT
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches ; 6.4 ounces
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: September 23, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #29,952 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Amazing Potential, Sadly it Fails in Gameplay, October 13, 2003

By 

Lisa Shea "medieval swordfighting enthusiast" - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Once Upon a Knight (CD-ROM)

I really wanted Once Upon a Knight to be a great game. I love RPGs and I love strategy games. This seemed like the perfect combination of genres, with cow-humor too! Unfortunately, it fell short.

First, some of the good points. The graphics are really impressive, sort of a cross between Black & White, WarCraft III and Nox. You have water with reflections, waving trees, very detailed friends and enemies.

Gameplay is also very much a cross between Nox and WarCraft III. There's a strategy game where you go around gathering weapons and armor, watching your health and killing the bad guys. There's also a RPG game where you ... go around gathering weapons and armor, watching your health and killing the bad guys - while gaining experience. The maps and story are pretty much the same.

The cut scenes have amazingly well done graphics which add to gameplay. The sound is quite good when it works properly, and there are little touches that show a sense of humor behind the scenes.

With all of these things going for the game, it should have been one I LOVED. This is about perfect for my interests. But despite trying several times to get into enjoying this game, each time I walked away in frustration and anger. How could the game suck so badly??

First off, whoever QAed this game did a pretty bad job. My machine here is a 3 GHz machine with a great video card, 1 gig RAM and plays hundreds of games without a glitch. When I put Once Upon a Knight on it, the game CRAWLED and mouse movement was incredibly jerky. I had to crank down all settings and put the resolution at one too low for my monitor to draw well to get it to play even reasonably. Even so, there was mouse lag and jerky video. This problem was even worse on other machines I tried it on - all between 2 GHz and 3 GHz.

Next, the game just wasn't very involving at all. There are so many games I've played - Dungeon Siege, Diablo, Baldur's Gate, etc. - where the story and gameplay drew me in and I was really interested in continuing to play. I would stay up all night to get to another level. With Once Upon a Knight, I had to force myself to keep plodding forward. It just didn't seem interesting at all.

I have been a member of the SCA for years and love medieval stories and activities. But the incessant 'I mustest telleth thee why thee musteth goeth on a questeth' was bordering on torture. 'Archaic speech' works really well in some contexts - but they did it so incredibly poorly, misusing parts of speech and using poor grammar to boot - that it was like trying to read L337 SP33CH to play a game.

The default settings for the game added to its unplayability. They start with dialogue boxes off - but the dialogue is poorly done and half the time you can't tell what the people are saying. Plus the default music volume drowns out the speech. I've already mentioned what the default graphics settings do to gameplay.

It seems like such an incredible shame to me, that a basic idea that was so great, combined with graphics that had such potential, ended up combining to create a game that was so unenjoyable. It really is a prime example how having a great foundation in a game means nothing if plot, QA and testing aren't done well. Having brilliant reflections in water are fine, but if you have no incentive to walk the landscape, they'll never be seen.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not bad, BUT..., March 29, 2004

By 

Orion "orionca" (Riverside, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Once Upon a Knight (CD-ROM)

The game installed and ran smoothly on my 2.7Gig machine. The only slowdowns were during the Autosaves. Graphics are decent if not spectacular and the manual is complete and well written.

Having said that, the game is boring as heck. The campaign is linear, with little choice about what to do or where to go next. As someone else mentioned, the horribly mangled Elizebethian dialect would get you thrown out of most Ren Faires. Combat options are limited to: Run forward and hack until your health bar drops into the red, then run away, or stand off and shoot arrows, chuck spears, or shoot fireballs and hope nobody gets close to you. I found it a pretty pointless hack-and-slash where I could cere less about the outcome and even less about the depressingly one-dimensional characters.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An RPG stripped of all RPG qualities, October 28, 2004

By 

Serge (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Once Upon a Knight (CD-ROM)

The graphics, gameplay, and sounds are amazing, no problem there. The camera angles are a little tight sometimes making it difficult to see what you're getting yourself into but they are not nausiating or too terribly annoying. The environments and music really set the mood. Even the storyline is very interesting. However, if you're looking for a game that you can play for a long time or really get into, this isn't it.

I was excited for the first 2-3 hours, then it just got repetitive. You walk around hacking, slashing, or bashing your enemies to bits. You find new weapons once in a while and you can learn new combos or prayers once in a while. I just found it disappointing that they decided to stop here. This could have been a great role-playing game if they had incorporated RPG elements such as stats, xp, levelling up, skills, character classes, etc. But as it stands, you can only play a knight, you use either a sword, a mace, or an axe, and your "skills" are combos, which make the game feel a little more like a medieval Mortal Kombat in a 3D environment. Not to mention that the number of combos and prayers are very limited thus making the game that much more repetitive. It just lacks some depth.

If you're not looking for an RPG but just a linear hack & slash where you don't have to do anything but kill enemies, this is a good game. If you're looking for an RPG, this isn't the game for you.