Throughout the Middle Ages kingdoms vied for control of the land, the gold, their gods and most of all, their destiny. In Knights of Honor players don the mantle of a Middle Age lord and guide their fledgling kingdoms down the road of prosperity, or ruin.

There have been many such games in recent years and many of had features similar to Knights of Honor. Medieval: Total War for instance was an astonishingly detailed and accurate representation of massive real time warfare, but was very light on diplomacy and kingdom management. Similarly, Crusader Kings was extremely dependant on diplomacy and kingdom management but had only the most rudimentary of warfare capabilities. It would not be a misrepresentation to say that Knights of Honor is an amalgamation of all the different features of the many games of its genre. However, the developers have taken all of these elements and managed to blend them into a very cohesive, logical and entertaining package. All the elements are there, diplomacy, warfare, theology, and development.

But the twist is that Knights of Honor has taken the kingdom builder to the next level by making it real time. Yes, real time strategy games have been done to death, but it’s fairly rare to see a real time strategy game that is so heavily focused on kingdom building and management. Typically, games of this variety are turn based and give you all the time in the world to plod through all the menus and building options, checking each cities building queue and the status of each army with complete leisure. By taking Knights of Honor into real time, the enemy is building just as fast as you are. The armies are piling up, improvements are going into each city, alliances are being made and goods are being traded while us poor humans are fumbling through the interface. Ok, it’s really not that bad, but as the game grows in intensity and your kingdom expands, it can border on overwhelming. Border, spill over and slap you in the face with a big wet tuna.

I’ve found that what can really help is to find your groove and focus on it. If you find you’re particularly deft at manipulating the diplomatic realm of the game, then do only the most basic tasks in the other realms of the game and focus your attention on diplomacy. Yes, you will likely run into some trouble from one area or another. Perhaps some early raids before you can get your alliances set of perhaps a very slow development process since your coin is being spent elsewhere but by keeping your eye on the ball you can negate a lot of anxiety that comes from having your attention scattered into so many areas.

Some of the more outstanding features include the ability to play over one hundred different kingdoms, choosing from any of the three Middle Age starting periods and all of the kingdoms, technologies and factions that are historically accurate for that period. On top of that you can build up an entourage of knights and assign them to the tasks of assisting in the management of different aspects of kingdom, such as assigning a knight to be the marshal or cleric of a particular city or town.

Just as you would expect from a game with good historical accuracy, players can choose to play different kingdoms and each of those choices could change the look, feel and sound of the game as each of the one hundred and fifty provinces span three geographic regions and have any of the three architectural styles, West European, Eastern European and Arabian. And of course there are a plethora of units to choose from including infantry, cavalry, siege engines and all the usual suspects.

As far as combat goes, there is nothing in Knights of Honor that really sets it apart from any of the other medieval real time strategy games, with one notable exception: battle scenarios. Knights of Honor classifies the different types of combat events into what they call battle scenarios. There are essentially nine battle scenarios and include such common warfare tasks such as town assault, river crossing and camp assault. The trick here is that in most real time strategy games use an open map throughout the entire but Knights of Honor uses one type of open map for non-combat gameplay and then breaks into the battle scenarios when it comes to dealing with combat.

The other benefit of having Knights of Honor structured in this manner is the fairly original ability to have a real time, multi-player kingdom builder game. That’s right, there are four multi-player modes that allow six players per mode. Now that just rocks.

The only real downside to Knights of Honor is that the tech is totally lackluster. The graphics are adequate and certainly not the massive three dimensional scale of the Total Annihilation series. The audio is quality and functional, but doesn’t feel inspired. On the upside, sticking to such common technologies allows the game to have some pretty tight code that displayed no bugs or other issues.

Fans of medieval real time strategies and kingdom builders will almost certainly love this game but many will be completely overwhelmed by Knights of Honor. Editor's Note: Knights of Honor is being published by Paradox Interactive and was released officially today - May 10th, 2005. While there have been reviews of the game in North America, this review marks the very first official look at the game under the Paradox label. You can learn more about that by visiting Paradoxplaza.com .