Undead Knights Review

It has been said that if you laid all the ninjas and dynasties slayed in the extensive back-catalogue of hack and slash super-studio Tecmo-Koei head to toe, they would loop the world all the way from Neo Tokyo to the Great Wall several hundred times over.

At least it has now.  In such capable hands you might expect the introduction of a new IP that marries the slicing and dicing of a K-T game with the real-time character management of Pikmin or Overlord to be an exciting prospect.

Your undead army can be used to destroy threats, clog up traps and quite regularly to form bridges atop one another

Set in an undisclosed European Kingdom, Undead Knights tells the tale of a cuckolded king maneuvered into killing his own daughter and husband-to-be along with a loyal knight, though rather than settling for an after-life of providing sustenance for worms, Sylvia and brothers Romulus and Remus accept the gift of a rebirth from a shadowy death-like figure who also grants them the power to create armies of the undead to control with a touch. The three return to exact revenge on the king, the wicked queen and anybody else who may have been involved along the way.

In terms of maintaining a consistent art direction, Undead Knights is something of a mish-mash. Imagine the gothic mischief of Castlevania mixed with a very angsty foul-mouthed teen and you’re half way there. The world is constructed of predictably typical defense garrisons and uninspired castle interiors, with very little to distinguish one area from the next.

In its defence, Undead Knights does manage to display quite a number of enemies and even more of your undead on screen at one time with little in the way of slowdown, and commanding your denizens to kill results in a pleasing display of butchery, though the entire design is lacking any kind of individual stamp of direction and screams generic video game zombie fodder.