Knights of the Cross

The Good

• The setting is quite original and I don't think anyone had ever made a game about these events before : the Tannenberg battle between the German order of the Cross and the Polish Kingdom.

• The battle field is made in pre-rendered 3D and looks about OK BUT... (see below).
• Arguably the game has a lot of content (about 100 scenarios, in campaign or standalone) and can last a long time, if you can stand the game for long enough.

**The Bad**
Basically everything else:

• The graphics are very dated. True the battle fields are modeled ok, but they are almost 100% static: rivers don't flow (except in rare, random spots), there is no wind in the trees, and so on. Units animation is not shocking but remains very basic.
• There are unacceptable graphical glitches, like when your soldiers walk on top of roofs (that's because the battlefield is in fact just a pre-rendered image)
• The music gets repetitive fast and sound effects are also on the basic side.
• The AI is terribly dumb and, in "capture the flag" missions, will leave his flag 100% undefended (I admit I mostly played the game on easy level, but this is just toooooo easy).
• One of the game's main selling points is that the German and Polish armies are vastly different and that, in order to succeed, those differences have to be mastered. In practice, both armies are functionally exactly identical (they're graphically different though), except for a couple of units.
• The interface is one of the worst I've ever seen : it (very often) gets impossible to clearly distinguish your units from one another when the field starts to get crowded. There are plenty of other more minor annoyances throughout the interface.
• The manual has lots of loopholes. Only one little example: nowhere is it written that in order to signal the end of your turn, you must press the space bar. Pretty nasty since you won'tget far at all without this information. Another example : Some units are listed as being very different but have in fact the exact same statistics.
• Even on a high-end machine of today, this 2001 game (which, do I need to remind you, is not very impressive graphically) has slowdowns.
• All this makes the length of the game pointless because I doubt anyone will stand playing it for more than a few hours.
• Last, my copy of the french version, which I bought sealed, did not come with a manual, neither on paper, nor on the CD

**The Bottom Line**
While writing this review, the main challenge was to refrain from writing awful things using rude words. This is an old-school turn-based wargame (with a hided hexagonal grid). This, in itself, is nothing wrong, but the game gets virtually everything wrong. I suppose you should blame the budget more than the talent of the developers (the credits are incredibly short for a game of this type), but in an ideal world, "Knights of the cross" would not exist. I especially dislike the fact that the main selling point is a blatant lie. That's too bad, because the game looked promising with its original setting.