Knights of the Chalice 2 Review
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Introduction
Developed by Pierre Begue's Heroic Fantasy Games, Knights of the Chalice 2 (KotC2) is the long-awaited follow-up to Knights of the Chalice - an old-school CRPG from 2009.
At its core, the original Knights of the Chalice was a fantasy adventure that didn't try to reach for the stars, and only had three playable races and classes. But it more than made up for it with great encounter design, enemy AI, and a combat engine that was pretty faithful to Dungeons & Dragons.
And so, it's no wonder that a bigger and better sequel for that game was successfully funded through Kickstarter. And now that KotC2 is available for purchase, let's see if it can live up to its impressive predecessor.
Knights of the Chalice Who?
Much like the previous game, KotC2 is based on the Open Game License (OGL) version of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Edition, which I personally consider to be the pinnacle of D&D.
And while OGL itself is fairly limited in what it covers, it allows those using it to alter that basic ruleset. So, thanks to its crowdfunding campaign, KotC2 now features a total of 10 playable races and 22 classes. Some of those classes are your usual Fighters and Wizards, but a lot of them are quite unique and out-there, which sort of counterbalances the lack of multiclassing in the game.
On the martial side of things, you have classes like Gladiators and Death Knights. Spellcasters have Bishops and Warlocks. A number of classes are based around Psionics. And even some of the familiar classes can surprise you with new functionality.
Wizards, for example, seem to be inspired by Dragonlance and have several Moons affecting their powers. Rogues exist as the spell-casting variant. Bards get their own unique songs and song-like spells. And Sorcerers, instead of just being lazy Wizards, are positioned as a hybrid between a Wizard and a Cleric.
And this brings us to another important point - a lot of the stuff you think you know about D&D works slightly differently in KotC2.
All spellcasters learn several new spells per level here, and then can further expand their spellbooks by copying spell scrolls. But then, they don't need to further prepare those spells, and can simply cast a set number of spells of each level per day. The one big exception here are the Psionic classes where instead of spell slots you have one big pool of power points.
Attributes can also surprise you with how they work, especially with some of the hybrid classes where you can have a situation where a class needs Intelligence to cast arcane spells, Wisdom to cast divine spells, and Charisma to determine how many bonus spells of each type they get.
And when it comes to Skills, KotC2 doesn't use anything resembling your standard D&D skill system. Instead, a character's class, race, attributes, and even Cleric Domains give them access to Skills that can be used in conversations or when interacting with the environment.
In practical terms, this means that having a Kobold or a Halfling on your team will allow you to explore some tight passages, while a Half-Giant or anyone with over 20 Strength will be able to lift heavy objects and bust down doors.
All these changes, plus just the sheer scope of the options you have, can feel overwhelming, but in a good way. On the one hand, it's a familiar system, that is if you're familiar with D&D. But on the other, thanks to all the changes, everything is fresh and exciting. And with your party consisting of up to eight characters, you can spend quite a lot of time building your perfect team.
What's great about all this is that while the game is undeniably old-school, it uses the popular these days hyperlink system that allows you to click most of the stuff you see on your screen and get immediately directed to a detailed in-game explanation for what a feat does, which bonuses a particular race gets, or how a class works.
Now, the original Knights of the Chalice had this dated but charming top-down aesthetic reminiscent of Ultima VII. KotC2, on the other hand, looks like one of those websites you go to when you want to play some D&D online, complete with flat maps, mismatched assets, sudden perspective changes, and sprites that bear only a passing resemblance to what they're supposed to represent.
And the scary thing is, this is actually an improvement compared to what the game was originally supposed to look like, where character and monster models were portrayed as these circular tokens. You can still use these tokens as an option, and I did try using them, and I have to tell you that watching a bunch of pucks sliding across a flat surface is just as pathetic and disorienting as you would expect.
Thankfully, we now have proper sprites, even if they don't always fit. As in your Centaurs will still look like regular bipedal humanoids. But at least there, you can pretend that this is just like when you played pen and paper Dungeons & Dragons with your friends, and because you weren't insane to actually buy official D&D figurines, you were using a collection of Warhammer miniatures, Lego dudes, and Monopoly pieces for your characters.
So in the end, even though this is without a doubt one of the ugliest games ever made, when you're actually playing it, it feels surprisingly close to the original Knights of the Chalice, and that was very much a pleasant experience. I still would've preferred if this game simply iterated on the original's art style, but I guess it just wasn't in the cards.
Augury of Chaos
The main way to play the game right now is to boot up the Augury of Chaos module. It's a complete fantasy adventure for a party of six characters (and up to two NPCs) that will take you from level 1 all the way to around 20.
The story is pretty simple. Your party of adventurers rolls into a village beset on all sides by various forces of evil. You do battle with those forces of evil and in the process uncover a bigger conspiracy of evil. You confront the big bad before you're actually ready, and in accordance with his Villains Anonymous playbook instead of crushing you, he teleports you into a hostile environment. This gives you a chance to become stronger and come back later to settle the score.
Along the way, you'll deal with squabbling goblin tribes, explore ancient tombs, and battle all sorts of demons, beholders, and necromancers. You know, your standard fantasy dungeon crawler fare. But in a pleasant turn of events, the game actually gives you a lot of agency when dealing with those threats.
At times you can reach an understanding with some of the subterranean denizens, which allows you to trade or rest within their territory. Occasionally, you can use your skills to take out an enemy leader before manually dispatching the remaining rabble. There's even an encounter where you can recruit a former foe to become one of your companions.
The game is split into several self-contained chapters, each represented by what is essentially an expansive dungeon. There's a village and its surrounding areas, a sewer, a bigger sewer, and a stronghold captured by the forces of evil.
Without a doubt, the main attraction here is the combat. Each area is tightly packed with challenging encounters that will put your tactics and understanding of the underlying systems to the test. Much like in the original game, you can only rest here in predetermined spots, and only a limited number of times, which makes smart resource management very important.
When this module was originally released for the game's Kickstarter backers, it was generally considered to be very difficult. And while you can still experience that original level of difficulty, right now, the suggested Normal mode feels moderately challenging without becoming frustrating or unfair.
With Augury of Chaos being a high-level D&D campaign, there are several ways to make things tougher on the player. Something like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, for example, inflates monster stats and then asks you to build characters that can reliably overcome a long list of natural immunities and an Armor Class of 80.
Augury of Chaos instead plays around with creative enemy placement, overwhelming numbers, and spellcasters that start battles with a long list of active buffs. I find this to be the more satisfying approach. The only thing that feels cheesy there is the developer's annoying habit of granting some of the tougher enemies a bunch of spell-like abilities that for all intents and purposes are spells, but can be used as swift and free actions purely to make your life harder.
On the other end of it, you have access to a wide range of combat maneuvers that feel very impactful, the very much overpowered high-level spells, plenty of ways to increase your initiative scores and simply not give your enemies a chance to act, and a lot of powerful magic items.
And if you're not satisfied with the gear the game gives you, you can engage in some crafting that, just like back in Knights of the Chalice, allows you to create some absolutely monstrous weapons capable of trivializing any threat.
With combat being such an important part of the whole experience, we still shouldn't forget that Augury of Chaos has plenty of non-combat encounters in the form of puzzles, riddles, and secrets.
Seeing how the game was primarily designed by one guy, its puzzles are expectedly quite idiosyncratic. The designer is fond of both math and chess? Sure, here's a puzzle combining the two, because why not. And here's a psych test. Or a coded message you have to decipher. There's even a crossword puzzle at one point.
These puzzles act as a nice change of pace and, for the most part, are pretty fun. But if you don't like them, the game has a built-in hint system that eventually just feeds you the answer.
The one outlier there is the crossword puzzle. While most of the questions there are obvious, a few simply make no sense, and asking for a hint only gives you the first letter that you already have from answering some other question. Thankfully, you can find the solution online, so if you get stuck there, just ask Google for help.
Overall, Augury of Chaos is a neat dungeon-crawling adventure that will take you somewhere in the vicinity of 30 hours to complete and probably leave you hungry for more, even if its later stages become a bit samey due to the imbalanced nature of high-level D&D.
If that's the case, you can try beating this module with a different party or opting for a higher difficulty level. But apparently, more adventures are on the way.
Other Adventures
So, what do you do after you're done with Augury of Chaos? Well, you can also play through the Tutorial module. Apart from teaching you the ropes, it acts as a self-contained adventure that in some ways feels more well-rounded than Augury of Chaos. From my understanding, it was developed after Augury, which can only mean good things for the subsequent modules.
According to the game's Kickstarter campaign, at least three official modules are already planned. A mid-level adventure, a high-level adventure, and an epic adventure.
But in the meantime, you should know that the game is shipped with a powerful editor that allows you to create your own adventures. It's too early to tell just how many of those will get made eventually, but already, you can find some unofficial modules online.
Unfortunately, the game's mod hub seems to be tied to Nexus Mods, a place where you have to register an account before you can download anything, as opposed to Mod DB, where you can just download what you need without too much hassle.
Among the currently available stuff, Hearkenwold deserves a separate mention because it's essentially a standalone game ported into the KotC2 engine. It not being a commercial project, it can be a bit rough around the edges, its journal entries are lacking, its difficulty curve is all over the place, and it can be confusing to navigate. But it exists, it's free, fun, and offers plenty of interesting encounters.
Technical Information
I've already mentioned the game's visuals, so now let's consider its audio design. The music is fine. I'm pretty sure most of the tracks were present in the original Knights of the Chalice. Audio effects are in a similar ballpark. But voice acting, if you can call it that, is down there with the visuals.
Once you get over the fact that the game's main menu for some inexplicable reason keeps talking to you as you click it, you'll be presented with a very robust options screen that lets you adjust and fine-tune a great many things when it comes to both the game's difficulty and what it displays to you.
Unfortunately, this doesn't extend to the resolution, where the only options you have are fullscreen or a tiny window.
On the other end of this are the game's animations. The default animation speed is already fast, but the game allows you to increase it past ludicrous and all the way to plaid.
But what is perhaps the game's biggest technical issue is the fact that it's more prone to crashing than a legally blind octogenarian driving an F1 car. Pretty much anything you do can cause the game to crash, reinforcing the age-old wisdom to save often and in different slots. Thankfully, all this crashing mostly happens outside of combat, so if you quicksave right after you're done fighting, you shouldn't lose your progress.
At least the game is pretty quick to save and load. Still, hopefully, some future patches will make it more stable.
One other annoying problem mostly plaguing the later parts of the game are all the slowdowns that occur when the AI tries to figure out what to do, or when you move the cursor around a bunch of enemies, triggering some calculations regarding potential attacks of opportunity.
Conclusion
The original Knights of the Chalice had a simplistic story, neat old-school visuals, barebones character development, and great combat design. Now Knights of the Chalice 2, and in particular its Augury of Chaos module, trades in the first game's pleasant aesthetics for a greatly expanded list of character-building options.
The end result is an engaging fantasy adventure that feels like both a faithful adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons and a fresh system at the same time. If you like CRPGs and can get over the visuals, there's no reason for you not to pick this up.
