Knights and Merchants: The Shattered Kingdom

The Good
Good music

Pleasant graphics

The Bad
Requires too much micromanagement

The lack of skirmish mode is something noticeable on a RTS

Troublesome combat

The Bottom Line
When I played the demo in 2000, which contained only one mission, I had a positive view of game.Nice graphics, great music, an interesting gameplay resembling The Settlers, which involved a long chain of production to reach an objective. Remembering this, I did not think twice before purchasing the game, years later, when suddenly I found for sale.

The thrill was not equal. In the the first mission, your city starts getting attacked, but from then on, the computer takes an almost passive stance, returning to the attack only a few hours later, with few units. The combat is weak, units do not move well, and even worse, after being ordered to attack, they do not accept new orders until killing the enemy unit.

The production requires a lot of economic micro-management, and after a while (the missions are long) makes the game boring. The need to feed the army periodically, is a nice idea, but also not very well developed, having a large effect in your economy, since your serfs cannot be in two places at the same time. In the end I just found out that the demo I played was from the second game, "The Peasants Rebellion", and given the similarity between both, I don't believe even the new one (that looks like just a new pack of missions with the possibility to play in skirmish mode) will get any better while playing the campaign. With all this in mind, I believe that even when it was released there were better options for the strategy genre.