King Arthur: Legion IX

I track tactical RPGs by the quality of their decision space per turn, and Legion IX earns a respectable score there even if everything around that core is uneven. You command Gaius Julius Mento and a squad of six undead Roman soldiers through 15 handcrafted missions set in NeocoreGames' dark-fantasy Avalon, mixing grid-based turn-based combat with light base-building at a rebuilt Roman colony called Nova Roma. The combat runs on an AP system where every point matters: movement, basic attacks, special abilities, and positioning all draw from the same pool, and because all your units move before the enemy resolves their turn (closer in feel to Gears Tactics than to something like Triangle Strategy), optimising a full six-unit activation is a satisfying mental puzzle. Critically, there is no RNG on hit rolls, so when things go wrong they go wrong because of your read on the board, not a dice outcome. Armour works as a separate buffer that degrades with each hit, meaning resource pressure is real and the limited mid-mission heal options genuinely matter. The hero roster gives you recognisable archetypes with Roman flavour on top. Remus is your damage-absorbing tank. Sicarius brings ranged pressure and can deploy a scorpion bolt launcher. Virgilia functions as your AoE mage, hurling fire birds and beam attacks at clustered enemies. Each hero has a distinct skill tree, and gear is class-specific with two or three compatible classes per item, so there is a meaningful crafting layer at the Nova Roma blacksmith between sorties. The city upgrade loop itself is thin by grand-strategy standards. Buildings have only a handful of tiers and the resource economy (gold and crafting materials gathered or dismantled from loot) rarely creates hard choices past the midgame. It is functional rather than deep, more of a palette cleanser between missions than a proper management layer. Where things get complicated is the stuff orbiting the combat. The tutorial is one of the weakest I have encountered in the genre recently, leaving basic controls undocumented and trusting players to experiment their way to competence. The morality system, which lets Gaius drift toward full demonic corruption or claw back his humanity, is streamlined compared to Knight's Tale: choices arrive at scripted points and resolve as binary good-versus-evil decisions rather than the nuanced morality grid veterans will remember. The narrative is similarly trimmed. Six heroes means six personalities, but some of the voice work lands flat and the script does not give the cast much room to breathe. The main campaign also wraps its central conflict before the story is fully resolved, kicking into a sidequest endgame phase that drains momentum fast. It is worth flagging that Legion IX sits in an awkward product category. It launched as a standalone game but was built at standalone-DLC scope and price. Players coming from Knight's Tale will find the system complexity reduced across the board. Coming in fresh, you get a complete and reasonably polished entry point into Neocore's Avalon with around 12-15 hours of campaign content, a difficulty range from story mode to punishing, and no permanent hero death to soften the tactical stakes. Early builds had crashing issues tied to the skill-point allocation screen, which reviewers flagged loudly at launch, so confirming your version is patched before a long session is prudent. Steam reception settled at roughly 72 percent positive across several hundred reviews, which reads as "fans of the formula enjoy it, newcomers are mixed." For the tactics-focused player who has not touched Knight's Tale, Legion IX is a decent starting point precisely because its simplified systems lower the onboarding cost. The combat alone is good enough to justify a modest time investment, especially at a reduced price. Just do not arrive expecting the management depth of the original, and bump the difficulty up from normal if you have any XCOM hours behind you.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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