Knights in the Nightmare Review

Knights in the Nightmare is the newest game from developer Sting, and is the third game in the Dept. Heaven series, which includes Riviera: The Promised Land and Yggdra Union: We'll Never Fight Alone. Most of Sting's games have taken a genre and added new ideas and other twists to it, but still remaining close the genre it was based on. Knights in the Nightmare mixes numerous different play styles, such as Strategy RPGs (SRPG) and shoot-em-ups (shumps) to create a game which cannot be classified with just one or two genres. With this eclectic mix of play styles, is this game a nightmare gamers should avoid at all costs, or should they delve into the darkness to see the game within?

Knights in the Nightmare's control scheme uses the Nintendo DS's touch screen for the majority of the game's battles, using the face button for either pausing the game or revealing the back story of the characters through a system called Pause Talk (more on that later). Without going into too much detail (the game includes a immense tutorial), you use the touch screen to animate dead souls to attack enemies via the Wisp, the spirit of a dead king. You will be paying more attention to the top screen, however, since that is where all of the action takes place - the touch screen only shows a HUD-like display showing the units on the battlefield. Wherever your stylus moves on the touch screen, the Wisp will move there on the top screen.

There are over forty maps to play on, each of which having a set amount of rounds, and each round gives you 60 points of life to use, which will end once you reach zero. By holding the Wisp over a soul you can charge their attacks (giving up some of your life points), dealing damage to the enemies that appear each round. Each enemy killed will mark off a box on the bottom of the touch screen. Line the marks either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, and you clear the map. To kill enemies faster, you can drag weapons (which are picked before each round by the player) which deal more damage at the cost of using more life. Special items can also be dragged onto characters or non-playable characters (NPCs) to have them join you or get powerful weapons. However, the enemies will not let you kill them so easily - they will occasionally cause projectiles to appear on the screen, causing you to lose life if you touch them. In this sense, the game is similar to a shoot 'em up, causing the player to evade attacks while commanding their units in battle.

The touch based interface, for the most part, works extraordinarily well. Dragging equipment and items to the characters is very easy, and the game allows you to press the L button to cancel attacks or dragged items if you accidentally picked the wrong one. The Wisp moves in perfect motion with the player's motions on the touch screen, which is especially needed in some of the harder levels which have projectiles that take up most of the screen. One fault with the interface is that some icons are quite small due to the amount of information Sting needed to put on the screen, so it is easy to accidentally pick the wrong icon when evading an attack or using an item the wrong person and having to drag it again. This becomes less of a problem once you understand that the life points only decrease when your units attack or you get hit, thus you can take your time, but until you get used to the game, it can be a small annoyance.