Knights of the Chalice 2

Extremely disappointed to see AI images get added last week. I don't want to be ambushed with glossy slop, thanks.

Well, where should I start ? This game is the worst dnd game I have ever played in my life, I could go all day here talking about how this game is bad, but I will try to make it short. I will try to describe my experience: You have a level 6 - 7 party, let's say we maxed out our most needed attributes ( 18+ str, con... ) The enemy party have 10 barbarians that can use psionic ♥♥♥♥ and cause 5d4+ something aod dmg, 10 spell casters that will spam AOE DMG AND AOE CC, 10 creatures that will hit you with 99% accuracy and have 10 attacks+ per round. You can't buff your party before battles, you are always in disadvantage, in difficulty terrain ( which enemies will not be affected by ) the enemies are always buffed, enemy casters starts the fight with mirror image, blur, stone skin, and they have same stats as warriors too... ( high HP, 5 attacks per round, +20 to hit + 10 dmg + 3d6 to dmg) on top of that the designer decided that it was not enough to have you outnumbered, forcefully outpositioned, underleveled, undergeared, the designer thought it would be funny to spam reinforcements out of nowhere and surround your party a second time, HAHA. Every battle will be as described above... so yeah, don't waste your time and money on this garbage. I am a D&D veteran who enjoyed great games like baldurs gate 1 & 2, icewind dale 1 & 2 and other great crpgs and I really hope that this review will help somebody !

So I kickstarted this game and played it from the very first edition. I really like this game. It's a great 3.5 DnD adaptation. The fights in the main campaign are like puzzles you have to figure out how to solve. It lets me powergame and craft items to my hearts content. The new content, not in the 3.5 DnD OGL is fun and cool. I have gotten hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of this game. The main campaign is insanely hard, though not nearly as hard as it was on first release. However, the $45 price point which hasn't come down to anything reasonable in years is just plain crazy. This is a $20 game at best, and that is pushing it. It is a not a highly polished big studio game, it's some guys indy passion project. I can't, in good faith, recommend this game to my friends or family, just because due to the price point. Sadly, I think this has killed any chance of the game building enough of a fanbase to really take advantage of the amazing mod support. There is maybe 1 good mod campaign out. In theory there should be 2 more official campaigns coming out, but I am not holding my breath.

Unfortunately Knights of the Chalice 2 is plagued by poor design decisions which mar what would otherwise be a great game. The good: Great combat system. Good variety of enemies. Combat encounters are varied with plenty of opportunity for using different tactics. Good implementation of 3.5 The bad: Encountered quite a few bugs. Puzzles are generally poor including geometry related questions and overly long rune translations. Difficulty is highly variable. The worst: The game does not respect the players time. I encountered a few frustrating design elements but what made me quit playing was the moronic decision to gate content based on a very challenging combat encounter with ABSOLUTELY no warning. After winning the Pizarra fight (which took 6-7 tries) the designer decided to block off access to previous merchants (goblin camp) with no warning and with zero explanation. There was literally no reason to do this apart from trying to punish the player for no reason. Had to uninstall after this. I don't have time to waste 5 hours winning a battle which then blocks me from completing other content with ZERO warning.

A cr 540 fight. You are that axshole dm that wrote a game because no one would play with you as you got an erection under your table, from slaughtering your players. At cons I used to find dms like you and rip your underwear over your head and hang you ass out to dry. Shame you got the mechinics mostly right on 3.5 for the players but your on mobs dont follow the same rules.

I greatly enjoyed the original knights of the chalice and long awaited the sequel. I would not recommend this product at all. The game includes various elements and 'dead ends' where you can very easily get stuck with on real direction of where to go. The game also has a 'guidebook' for sell, the game is messy and very directionless without it and I personally believe this is part of the games design in an effort to squeeze more money out of customers. Money is tight these days, don't waste it here.

The game has decent mechanics and a nice visual style. It also has several unique classes and playable races not found in other typical DnD games. But the developer seriously needs to read the "Dungeon Masters' guide to creating a fun and balanced campaign". The tutorial was okay, but the main campaign is a slog. It takes 45+ min per encounter, and that's if you manage to beat them the first time around. By the time I finish I feel mentally fatigued rather than rewarded. As a result, I generally do one encounter, then shelve it for several months until I feel like continuing the story. I should note that I'm playing on "normal" difficulty and aiming for the game completion achievement. The game contains a module creator so you can make your own campaigns, but the developer wants to monetise on sharing them. The price ($55) is also incredibly steep. $20-$30 would be much more reasonable. I am on the fence as to whether I want to recommend this game, but considering the exorbitant price and lack of community sharing (i.e. player-made campaign workshop) I'm going to say nay.

One of the best games I've ever played. Really interesting mechanics and balance, synergies that make you think before you play. Sometimes this feels a bit like chess, which is great. Finished the main quest about 8 times, this game is actually cheap for how much it offers.

Knights of the Chalice 2 is a turn-based combat game. This is a game that is built around showcasing this combat and its artificial intelligence. Its gameplay rules are based off of D&D 3.5 OGL. This game is known by those in smaller circles as a very difficult game, and it can be, but that depends on how you want to play it. When the game first came out, it was absolutely brutal in difficulty and uncompromisingly unforgiving of mistakes. Two years hence, the story is very different. You can adjust the difficulty to your taste now; instead of every section being a high stress endurance test of strategic use of your very limited resources and tapping dry every spell and every ability to make it to the next campfire, you can have up to 75% of your parties hit points recovered after every battle. You can allow yourself to have the maximum allowable hp on leveling up, reduce encounter difficulty by inflicting negative levels on the enemy, and so on. You can turn the battles into high stakes warzones of deadly encounters and get some recovery after, so you can [i]break up[/i] the long stretches of danger. Conversely you can set it to archmage mode where all it does is [i]removes all of limitations on the enemy[/i] and removes any benefits for you so you all play on a ‘level playing field’. People here balk at the price, but if you really [i]really[/i] love some good combat with actually smart AI that doesn’t cheese or cheat but can and [i]will[/i] put your tactics to the test, look no further. Don’t let the ultra janky graphics distract from the tough combat encounters and challenging design. The tutorial is harder than the campaign, so don’t let that discourage you.

This feels more like a student's first effort rather than a game priced similarly to a AA/AAA title. The graphics and music are an amateurish mix with cringey AI generated content. The writing is childish, the story is almost non-existent, there are no real characters, and the map design is extremely simple and linear. It's less an RPG and more just an encounter simulator where you have to play 100+ fights in row with little content in between. Combat could have potentially been the saving grace but the poor design and lack of balance just completely ruins it. To artificially create challenge the dev has gone the low effort route of extreme stat bloat of enemies and forcing the player to play through each encounter using a very narrow range of tactics. DnD 3.5e was always a broken system, particularly the balance of high level magic, but the dev added additional poorly-thought out homebrew rules that break things even further. As a result spell casters are ridiculously overpowered and every encounter just comes down to which side can spam more area effect spells first. This is made worse by the inept implementation of movement and attacks of opportunity which hugely nerfs melee characters. Most encounters plays out like this; you get ambushed and surrounded by large numbers of enemies with no agency to position or prepare before fights while every enemy mage comes buffed with multiple high level spells well beyond the encounter level. The buffs make every mage a tank who can spam multiple high level area effect spells every turn and melee characters and archers are essentially useless outside of grapplers. Furthermore there are large number of mages in every fight. Even spiders, beetles, and slimes are mostly high level spellcasters. New enemies will appear mid fight at short range and immediately get to act with full actions, and even regular non-boss opponents can spam high level abilities. As soon as a fight is over you will often get immediately ambushed by another encounter before you've had a chance to pick up loot, heal, or sometimes even save. It just seems like the goal here was on pure annoyance over fun. The game isn’t particularly difficult once you know the tactics the dev intended. However it just isn't fun because the combat lacks variation and is too heavily weighted towards RNG rather than skill/tactics, the grind of playing exact same fights endlessly every few steps, and especially due to how pigeonholed you are in which party builds you can use succesfully. Even the tutorial is very poorly designed and suffers badly from balance issues and constant party wipes from pure RNG. KOTC1 was a decent effort from 2009 and it's quite disappointing to see how much worse the sequel is, even for an indie game.