Fans of sweeping battles and Chinese history certainly have reason to celebrate today as Oasis Games’ long await massively multiplayer strategic action game Tiger Knight: Empire War comes into playable early access. Tiger Knight hopes to recreate the large scale battles of the Han Dynasty, the Kushan Empire, the Parthian Empire, and the Roman Empire, with intense action and hundreds of player controlled units. Let’s just hope those servers can survive.
The game certainly looks ambition, whether it can keep to those lofty claims or not. Apart from the aforementioned massive player conflicts, Tiger Knight also proposes a more strategic element in its faction war, which sees 5 players from each faction (Of which there are 4) leading twenty AI controlled combatants into the fray with period appropriate weaponry, on horseback. I’m no expert, but that sounds an awful lot like some sort of harebrained, massively multiplayer online Dynasty Warriors game. That could be pretty darn cool.
No matter how you feel about the gameplay concepts at work here, the whole thing looks pretty. The character models, the multitudes of weapons and armor (Over 400 of each, they say), even the swaths of dead you’ll be leaving in your wake are proposed as high quality, running smoothly with the help of the Unreal 3 engine.
There’s no telling when a full release will come, I’m sure the coming months will see relentless bug fixes and stress tests for Tiger Knight. Early access will see players taking the reins of the Three Kingdoms or the Roman Empire with three servers on which players may go about their relentless warmongering.
Tiger Knight: Empire War has been in development since Feburary of 2014. It is being developed by the Chinese developer Oasis Games for both PC and Mac. System requirements are fairly light, so you don’t have much of a reason not to mount up and go to war.
