Knight Squad

My first session with Knight Squad ended with someone holding a minigun in a medieval castle and another player being run down by a knight on horseback, and I think that tells you everything you need to know about the tone Chainsawesome Games was going for. Released in late 2015, this is a top-down arcade arena brawler built entirely around local and online multiplayer, holding up to eight players in a single chaotic match. The closest spiritual relatives are Bomberman and old-school Gauntlet, but once the laser guns and miniguns start dropping onto the battlefield alongside the crossbows and broadswords, those comparisons feel almost quaint. The mode variety is genuinely one of the game's strongest cards. The base package ships with around nine modes, and an optional Extra Chivalrous DLC adds four more along with three extra knight characters. You get the expected deathmatch and Capture the Flag variants, but the more interesting ones are the stranger propositions. Soul Hunter asks you to bank the souls of fallen knights at your spawn point before someone kills you and steals them back, which layers a satisfying risk-reward tension on top of the usual mayhem. Serial Killer hands you a target color at a time and demands you work through all seven opponents in sequence. Then there is Soccer, which is exactly what it sounds like except everyone is armed, and the ball does not care about your dignity. Each mode plays on a selection of maze-like, single-screen arenas, and weapons spawn constantly across the map: starting sword, bow and arrows, crossbow, bombs, laser gun, and the chaotic minigun among them. Power-ups layer on speed boots, shields, and the occasional horse mount. The result is matches that rarely feel the same twice. The honest caveat is that Knight Squad is, at its core, a couch party game wearing online multiplayer clothes. The Steam version does support online play, which is a genuine advantage over the Switch port, but reviewers and players consistently agree that the magic peaks when human opponents are physically in the room yelling at each other. The single-player challenge mode, which pits you against skeletons, dragons, and waves of enemy knights across timed scenarios, exists and provides a few hours of content, but it reads more like a practice room than a destination. The bots are actually competent enough on higher difficulties to keep things interesting when friends are unavailable, which is more than most party games manage, but the soul of the game is clearly the eight-person living room session. A few smaller friction points are worth naming. With all eight characters sprinting around the screen at once, tracking your own knight can get genuinely confusing. Reviewers have noted that the hit detection and attack timing can feel a touch sluggish, particularly on keyboard, so a controller is strongly recommended. The character selection is cosmetic only: each knight plays identically, which keeps matches balanced but means there is no build variety or meta to follow. The game is also a decade old at this point, and while the arcade-style art holds up reasonably well, do not come in expecting polish. What Knight Squad gets right, it gets quietly, cleanly right. The controls are stripped to movement and one attack button, which means a first-time player can be genuinely competitive within minutes. The pacing of weapon pickups and the constant threat of a one-hit kill keeps every match feeling alive and unpredictable. For the specific context it was built for, which is a group of people crowded around one screen looking for something to argue about, it delivers with commendable focus. Solo players and those without a reliable group should probably look elsewhere. But if you have the people, Knight Squad earns its place in the rotation.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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