25 Best Knight Games on PC and Consoles: Sword Combat, RPGs and Strategy

The best knight games put a sword in your hand and a slab of steel on your shoulders. Some chase brutal, physics-driven melee, others hand you an entire kingdom to rule from a castle keep, and a few reduce the whole fantasy to a lone armored hero descending into the dark. We rounded up the best knight games on PC and consoles, from realistic combat sims and hundred-player sieges to sprawling open-world RPGs, castle-building strategy and indie gems about heroes in armor. There is fresh blood here and there is time-tested classics people still fire up today.

This is a list about knights as characters and about fighting with cold steel — not about the Middle Ages in general. So stories about peasants, plagues or courtly scheming without a blade in sight sit this one out. Mobile idle clickers didn't make the cut either: only full games for PC and consoles, where you get to swing the sword yourself, lead an army to the castle walls, or raise your own fortress stone by stone.

The most direct way to feel like a knight is to grab a sword and face a living opponent. These knight games are built around melee: the swing, the feint, the parry and the strike decide everything. Some chase realistic fencing and the physics of a blow, others go for massive sieges with rams and catapults, but they share one truth — the winner isn't the one with the higher level, but the one who reads their rival best.

If you want to drop straight into the medieval carnage, start right here. Chivalry 2 by Torn Banner throws dozens of players onto a single map: Agatha Knights and the Mason Order clash beneath castle walls, roll siege towers, torch the gates and hack each other apart until the screen runs red. The headline mode is the objective siege — one side storms, the other holds, and over a single match the map changes face several times, from a breach in the gate to a bloodbath in the throne room.

Combat runs on stance and strike direction — slash from the side, stab forward, overhead chop — and there's real discipline inside the chaos: parry in time, catch a foe mid-swing, bury a blade in a distracted back. The knight class is the most armored of the four, with a whole spread of subclasses and weapons from the two-handed sword to the mace and the halberd. Anything on the ground is fair game: hurl a picked-up torch, a chicken, or even a severed limb at the enemy. The signature dark humor is a joy in itself — lose an arm and your character keeps roaring the battle cry and charging back in. It's the liveliest, most populated knight multiplayer around, easy for a newcomer to jump into and deep enough to master over hundreds of hours.

Where Chivalry bets on fun, Mordhau leans into grim mastery. Triternion's slasher is considered one of the deepest sword-combat sims out there: the strike system lets you manually angle your swing, drag it out or speed it up, bait your rival with feints and punish them on the counter. The gulf between a newbie flailing a blade and a veteran who reads you cold is enormous, and that depth keeps people around for years.

You build your fighter from scratch — armor type, helmet, heraldry, weapons from the two-hander and halberd to bows and even throwing knives — then take the build into one-on-one duels for honing technique, huge battles with siege engines and cavalry, a survival mode against waves of enemies, or a classic point capture. The game slipped off the streaming radar long ago, but its loyal community never left, and a good, honest brawl is always a click away.

Bohemia, the early 15th century, a blacksmith's son named Henry dragged back into a sprawling war — and still the most meticulous historical RPG about the Middle Ages there is. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 doubles down on everything that made the first game a cult hit: obsessive historical accuracy, a living open world where every guard sleeps and every tavern closes, and a fencing system with genuine weight behind each cut. There's no fireball to fall back on here — you learn to read distance, chain combos and manage stamina, or you die in the mud. Just how far it raises the bar is spelled out in the Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review.

Beyond the duels it's a full-blooded RPG: haggle, brew potions, pick locks, forge blades at the anvil and talk your way past a fight if your reputation allows. Warhorse built a world that treats the Middle Ages as a real place with laws and consequences rather than a fantasy backdrop, and that seriousness is exactly why the series stands apart. If you only play one game about becoming a knight the hard way, make it this one.

Where it all began, and still a must-play for anyone who wants realism over fantasy. The first Kingdom Come: Deliverance drops the same Henry into the same troubled Bohemia of 1403 with almost nothing to his name, and asks you to grow from a clumsy peasant who can barely hold a sword into a warrior who can stand against trained soldiers. The famously demanding combat, the save system that makes every risk matter and the sheer density of its historical world made it a landmark. It's rougher than the sequel and asks more patience, but the payoff — actually earning your skill instead of leveling into it — is unmatched. A cornerstone of any list of medieval knight games, and the seed of a whole top of games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

Guard left, feint right, punish an overcommitted swing — For Honor's Art of Battle system turns every clash into a test of timing and reading your opponent. Knights, Vikings, Samurai, and warriors from several later-added factions now share its large roster. The Knights alone range from versatile fighters such as Warden to the heavily armored Lawbringer and the agile Peacekeeper. In Dominion, two teams of four capture control points and fight among squads of AI soldiers. Nearly a decade after release, Ubisoft continues to add seasons, events, and new heroes, while cross-play keeps players on different platforms in the same matchmaking pool.

The sword catches on a doorframe, the helmet slides over the eyes, the knight topples from his own swing — and in Half Sword you control every bit of it. This is a physics-driven first-person duel sim where the body flops around on ragdoll physics and a fight comes down to centimeters and split-seconds. The result is equal parts horrifying and hilarious: a gauntleted punch can stun, a precise poke through a visor slit can drop a foe in one, and your own sword snags on everything in reach. It launched into early access and is still growing, but the sheer unpredictability of each scuffle sent it straight into highlight reels. It comes out gruesome one second and laugh-out-loud absurd the next — and almost never the same way twice.

This is where massive first-person knight battles began, back in the early 2010s. The original Chivalry was the first to show how thrilling online sword combat could be: the same sieges, the same battle cries and the same hand-drawn strike arcs, only in a rawer, more hardcore form. The official servers have long gone quiet, but the game isn't dead — community servers and bot matches keep it running, and the mechanics feel harsher and dirtier than the sequel's. It's a benchmark fans still measure newcomers against, and worth firing up to see where the whole genre started.

Want to lead not one hero but a whole unit into battle — and for free? Conqueror's Blade fuses medieval action and strategy: you play not a lone fighter but a warlord who charges in the front rank and commands a unit at the same time — spearmen, archers, knightly cavalry. Sprawling sieges with dozens of players on each side, authentic historical armor from Europe to Asia, and steady seasonal updates make it a comfortable way in if you want scale for free. The grind is long, but the first few hours already deliver the feeling of leading your people up the ladders.

Here the knight isn't an avatar in an online brawl but a full-fledged hero with a story and a loadout. Knight RPGs offer what the arena can't: freedom. Raise your own warband and conquer a kingdom, or drill your fencing to muscle memory in one-on-one duels. Open worlds, living economies and choices that shift the balance of power — that's what people come here for. If the pull goes beyond the knightly angle, there's a broader top of the best RPGs of all time to dig into.

Climb from a landless mercenary with a handful of recruits to the lord of a castle — maybe even to a crown of your own. That arc is exactly why people pour into Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, arguably the best open-world knight game going. It unfolds in the fictional realm of Calradia on the ruins of a collapsed empire, where rival factions claw at each other — among them Vlandia, a blatant homage to Western European knighthood with its heavy lance cavalry. You decide who to be: free sword-for-hire, merchant, bandit, or founder of your own kingdom.

Day by day you roam the map, recruit and train your warband, trade, raid caravans, marry for alliances and even smith your own weapons at the forge. And when it comes to blows, the camera dives from the strategic map straight into the thick of battle: you personally command the line, lead the knightly charge and trade cuts in the front rank yourself. Sieges come with rams, ladders and catapults, and tournaments let you face a single rival for glory and coin. Then there are the mods — a universe of their own, reworking the game into everything from Westeros and Middle-earth to the Napoleonic Wars. It swallows hundreds of hours whole.

It's over fifteen years old, yet its living mod scene still puts plenty of newer releases to shame. Warband is rougher and simpler than Bannerlord, but it set the formula: a free medieval world where you decide whether to serve a king as a noble knight, ride out as a free-booter, or found a realm of your own. The same hands-on combat on horseback and on foot, the same sieges, the same vassal recruitment, all in a slightly more primitive but astonishingly durable shape. Its modding scene is the stuff of legend, and the lower barrier to entry is why many still say to start the series right here.

Released in 2001, Blade of Darkness — also known as Severance: Blade of Darkness — emphasized weighty attacks, precise combos, and dismemberment long before modern action RPGs adopted similar ideas. You can choose from four heroes with distinct weapons and fighting styles; Sargon the knight is the most heavily armored and favors traditional swords and shields. The 2021 re-release added support for modern hardware, 4K resolution, upscaled textures, and gamepads while leaving the original content intact. Calling Blade of Darkness the direct ancestor of the soulslike genre would be an exaggeration, but its dangerous enemies, lethal traps, and demanding combat anticipated several ideas later associated with Dark Souls.

A knight doesn't have to be historical. A whole tier of games takes an armored hero and drops them into dark fantasy, where crusaders give way to fallen gods, dragons and cursed kingdoms. These share a high difficulty bar and a cult of melee: shield, sword and cold calculation against monsters, each able to kill in a couple of hits.

Even players who spent years steering clear of hardcore games got stuck for good in this enormous, brooding world. In Elden Ring you are the Tarnished — an exile returned to the Lands Between to gather the shards of the Elden Ring and claim the title of lord. One of the starting classes is the knight outright: heavy armor, shield and a dependable blade for those who'd rather meet a foe head-on than flit about in a mage's robe.

There's an unusual amount of freedom for a game of this stripe: bored at the gates of an unbeatable castle? Saddle the spectral steed Torrent and gallop off toward the next dungeon or a dragon in an open field. Mounted clashes, gigantic labyrinth-castles, dozens of bosses each with their own temper, and a deep build system where you can tune a knight into anything from classic sword-and-board to a two-handed slab of a hammer. The world never holds your hand or drops a waypoint, trusting you to work out where to go and which boss you're ready for. The Shadow of the Erdtree expansion added another vast region of new trials. That blend of freedom, beauty and honest severity is what made FromSoftware's game one of the biggest hits in years.

For many players this is where the love of the "suffering" genre began. Dark Souls sends a nameless undead into the dying kingdom of Lordran, where every corridor tests your nerve and a bonfire checkpoint becomes the only comfort. The knightly path is canonical here: a sturdy shield, a one-handed sword and patience over reflexes, because the game punishes greed and rewards caution. The remaster gently updated the graphics and netcode without touching what fans loved — a dense, interconnected world and that little jolt of triumph after every felled boss. It's the benchmark the whole genre still measures itself against — the followers alone fill an entire top of games like Dark Souls.

If the urge is to command the ones swinging the swords rather than swing one yourself, strategy is your aisle. Here the knight becomes a piece on a larger board: the heavy cavalry that decides a battle, the vassal you must keep in line, or the castle garrison ready to repel a siege. Castle-and-knight games let you feel like a lord whose choices shape the fate of whole fiefdoms. If the genre grips you beyond the knightly theme, dive next into the top of the best strategy games of all time.

Raise a fortress stone by stone, stretch the walls, line the towers with archers, feed your people — all for the moment an enemy army rolls up with rams. Stronghold has been a benchmark of the castle-builder for years, now back in updated form; economy and war are inseparable here, since a starving garrison won't hold even the prettiest wall. The Definitive Edition bundles the original with improvements, a campaign and a handy map editor. For lovers of medieval fortification it's still the first pick.

Same walls and archers on the towers, only instead of green England there's the sun-scorched Holy Land. Stronghold Crusader drops the building and the sieges into the thick of the Crusades, where heat and thirst turn into enemies every bit as deadly as an enemy catapult. The Definitive Edition refreshes the early-2000s classic — sharper visuals, new campaigns and an editor — while keeping the merciless enemy AI that a whole generation of strategists cut their teeth on. For the crusader-knight theme it's about the most recognizable city-builder there is, where the castle turns from a shelter into a war machine.

A whole nation is yours to run: diplomacy on the campaign map, city economies and armies that meet in spectacular battles of thousands, where knightly cavalry rams the line and trebuchets shatter walls. Medieval 2 remains one of the most beloved Total War entries set in the Middle Ages. Crusades, the Inquisition, the fight for the papal throne and gunpowder at the end of the era — the game spans the entire late Middle Ages. Fan mods keep it alive years on, and few match it for tactical depth — it sits comfortably in any top of the best medieval strategy games. Here you lead knights by the regiment, not one at a time — and that's the whole appeal.

Less a war game than a living soap opera about feudal nobility. In Crusader Kings 3 you play not a faceless country but a specific person and their dynasty: you marry for advantage, hatch plots, grant vassals land and hold their loyalty while crusades rage and kingdoms fall one after another. When your count or king dies, you carry on as the heir, and so on for centuries, generation after generation.

Every character is a tangle of traits, ambitions, weaknesses and inherited illnesses, and out of them come the stories fans retell for years: the genius schemer on the throne, the mad king, the war of brothers over an inheritance. Knights and holy orders here aren't markers on a map but living people: any baron can be courted, married to your daughter, turned against a neighbor or quietly poisoned at a feast. A crusade is declared as a great shared cause of the whole faith, and its outcome redraws half the world. A strategy for those who care more about people and their ambitions than tidy troop formations.

At the head of a small fief you lay out a village along the very contours of the hills, arrange crafts and supply lines, watch the seasons turn and grow a settlement into a proper walled town. Manor Lords is one of the most talked-about medieval city-builders in a long while. When an enemy arrives, it comes to battle — a small but honest militia and the lord's knights take the field. The project is still in early access and keeps adding system after system, but even now it stuns with its attention to the details of medieval life. You barely have to wage war here — building up your own holdings is the better part of it.

A chapter of knighthood all its own is the brotherhoods and orders: Templars, crusaders and the legendary knights of the Round Table. Some marched off on Crusade for faith and hidden relics, others live on in Arthurian legend, but all share a code, an oath and a sword sworn to an idea. Games that let you don the cross or take a seat at the Round Table are rare, which makes each one more precious.

A Templar knight and his companion, branded a heretic, flee the Inquisition together on the trail of the Holy Grail. That's the setup of The First Templar — an adventure-brawler about the Order of the Temple, with no shortage of plots inside the brotherhood itself. The hook is co-op: a live partner can take over the second character, and in solo play a companion handles them while you switch between the two at will (more worthy two-player picks sit in the top of the best co-op games). The combat is simple and broad, but the setting is rendered with real love for the crusader theme. An underrated pick for an evening or two: pure order romance, no grinds, no open world.

The young Templar Paul de Raque sets out to stop a demonic cult — and the road leads him from Europe's monasteries and castles straight to the gates of the underworld, through swarms of undead, traps and puzzles. Few remember this old-school slasher from the early 2000s, and unfairly so. By modern standards it's linear, but it wins you over with the grim atmosphere of a holy war against the unclean and an honest sense of a knightly crusade. Linear, grim and surprisingly sincere — a small find among older knight games on PC.

The knights around this Round Table aren't shining heroes but sinners, each with their own demons. King Arthur: Knight's Tale is turn-based tactics with an RPG core: you play the resurrected Sir Mordred, gather a party of Camelot's knights and lead them across a cursed Avalon, clearing each battlefield through careful, measured moves — one of the standouts in any top of the best tactical games. Between sorties you manage a crumbling Camelot and make choices on the line between virtue and tyranny that shift which heroes you can field and how it all ends. Brutal fights where a knight's death can be permanent, and a heavy dark-fantasy mood, make it one of the most knightly tactics games around — the rare case where you sit at the Round Table not for glory but for atonement.

Not every knight is clad in realistic plate — sometimes it's a tiny bug with a nail, or a hero with a shovel. The indie scene plays with the knight image however it likes: a metaphor for the lone hero here, an excuse for a fond parody there, but almost always a demanding game hides under the charming shell. A fine starting point for anyone after a knight game with character rather than a budget — and a good excuse to browse the top of the best metroidvanias.

Its silent hero is literally called the Knight — even if a small bug hides under the worn shell. Hollow Knight sends this tiny warrior with a nail for a sword deep into Hallownest, a fallen kingdom of insects full of secrets, bosses and quiet tragedy. Hand-drawn animation, a huge interconnected world and a high but fair difficulty made this game from the small Team Cherry studio a cult favorite. It's technically fantasy about bugs, but the image of a lone knight descending ever deeper into a dead realm hits right in the heart. The long-awaited sequel Silksong, starring the warrior Hornet, arrived later and only stoked the love for the series.

The "knight with a shovel" people so often half-remember. Shovel Knight is a charming pastiche of 8-bit classics: a blue knight with a shovel instead of a sword travels colorful stages, smashes enemies, bounces off them from above like in the old platformers, and searches for his lost love, Shield Knight. The level and boss design is polished to a shine, and the Treasure Trove collection adds several standalone stories starring other knights of the order to the main campaign. A warm, witty and surprisingly deep game loved by genre veterans and newcomers alike.

The frail priestess Lily walks a kingdom poisoned by an endless cursed rain, and the ones who fight for her are summoned spirits of fallen warriors — the very Knights who once guarded these lands, now twisted into monsters. ENDER LILIES puts them right there in the title, and it's earned. Each cleansed fighter becomes a new attack of yours, and from them you assemble your own combat style. A lingering atmosphere of decay, beautiful hand-drawn art and a mournful soundtrack make it one of the most atmospheric games in the genre. Beneath the demanding gameplay sits a quiet, aching fairy tale of decay.

A rat prince named Redgi takes up the sword to win back a homeland ravaged by a horde of frogs. Behind that touching hand-drawn wrapper, Tails of Iron hides a demanding soulslike-flavored action game: enemies hit hard, attacks have to be read by color and parried or dodged on time, and the bosses will make you sweat more than once. Between fights you rebuild the ancestral castle, craft weapons and armor, and hunt rare beasts for better gear. It's a small but full-hearted knightly epic, where a gruff narrator spins the tale like an old ballad beneath the tender art.

The easiest way in is Chivalry 2 — the liveliest, friendliest knight-battle multiplayer, where you don't need long to learn the ropes. Among single-player knight games, a newcomer will do well with Mount & Blade: Warband for its gentle learning curve or the cozy indie platformer Shovel Knight.

Yes. The best example is Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, where you can rise from a mercenary to the lord of a castle in a huge medieval sandbox. For a grounded, historical open world there's Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and for dark fantasy with a knight class, Elden Ring.

Stronghold: Definitive Edition handles building and defending fortresses, Medieval 2: Total War delivers massive clashes of knightly cavalry, and Crusader Kings 3 is the one for feudal intrigue and dynasties.

The First Templar and the old slasher Knights of the Temple: Infernal Crusade are built directly around the Order of the Temple, while King Arthur: Knight's Tale takes on the Round Table legends. The Crusade theme also runs through Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition and Medieval 2: Total War.

Yes. Conqueror's Blade is a large free-to-play online game about medieval sieges, where you command a unit and fight in the front rank yourself. You can download and try it at no cost.

So which knight games do you swing a sword in? Tell us in the comments who we forgot to summon under our banners — let's build the people's list together.

Knights aren't the whole of the medieval theme. If you want to stay in the age of castles and swords but look at it more broadly — through the eyes of common folk, free mercenaries or a whole civilization — take a look at the neighboring genres. There's harsh survival in the wilds, turn-based tactics about companies of sell-swords, and grand strategy about the rise and fall of nations — the kind that sits right beside the top of the best RTS games of all time. These medieval games swallow whole evenings even when the knight isn't the hero but just one soldier in the line. The sword is still there, of course, but beside it come a trade caravan, a plow, a letter of diplomacy to the king next door. Below are a few games that aren't strictly about knights but grew from the same medieval soil and will surely land with fans of plate and sieges.

A harsh survival sandbox in a cruel world with no heroes and no plot, but total freedom: gather a squad, build a base, hire on with someone's army or turn to banditry. Not about knights, but about the same taste for medieval savagery and self-authored stories.

A tactical RPG about a band of mercenaries trudging across a grim medieval world in search of coin. Turn-based fights, warband management and a stern economy — for anyone who felt Mount & Blade was missing exactly that squad-level tactics.

A historical real-time strategy that shows the Middle Ages at scale: knights, castles, siege engines and real civilizations from the English to the Rus. The logical next step for everyone who caught the Medieval 2 bug.