Many games allow gamers to play as knights in shining armor, but only a few let you become more than a simple warrior by allowing you to actually mount a horse and grab a lance. Yet doing this really stirred my imagination, perhaps because of the stories I heard about my ancestors as a child.

The first game I played that featured jousting was Lego Island 2. In it, the player had to defeat an enemy knight at a jousting tournament. That was one of the best parts of the game for me. The game's visuals were outdated even at the time of its release, so they look extremely odd now [2015].

The next game that gave me the experience of mounted lance combat was Mount & Blade and its expansion, Warband. Though their graphics also looked outdated compared to other games of their time, these games featured large-scale battles between medieval armies in which the players could participate. Unlike in Lego Island, where jousting was only a minor part of the game, Mount & Blade was built to simulate mounted combat and featured detailed lance control options. The following video shows two different ways to use the lance.

The underarm thrust is weaker, but needs less balancing and can be used at low speeds. The couched lance charge is what we all know well from jousting tournaments in movies.

The third game I would like to write about is Last Knight, a casual game. It is a running game for smart devices, in which the protagonist constantly moves forward with a more or less constant speed and the player only has to evade obstacles and defeat enemies along the way.

I'm not fond of this genre because I see only two situations that would interest me with this mechanic. One is when someone is running away from an unstoppable force, like when Indiana Jones is running from the big rock. The other is when you're riding a horse and you need a constant speed so use your lance. Last Knight is exactly that.

It looks like a humorous fairy tale, and you can ride and lance as much as you want. Unfortunately, this game annoys you with bugs like randomly switching camera angles and frame rate drops. But it's so fun that you always want to play just one more round.

Here was a trailer of Last Knight embedded from YouTube here.

Trivia:

• The original version of this post was published on one of my old blogs on 2015-03-28. I used the Blogger Takeout Viewer to make the text reusable.
• If you watch the video closely you can see a coat of arms painted on the shields and displayed over the head of the players' soldiers. That crest was given to one of my ancestors in the 14th century. See Family history.

The original version of this post is part of the Blaugust 2025 series on my blog along with:

• Helsinki Biennial
• Data & Encryption
• Intro through traits
• Hospital visit
• Win 3.1 Nostalgia
• Poets of the Fall
• Project done!
• Video games that made me learn
• Blaugust