I was more than a little skeptical when I first heard the sequel to 2021’s stylish action-movie deckbuilder Fights In Tight Spaces would have a medieval fantasy theme. Surely, I thought, there were other genres that would better fit the game’s two-fisted style; kung-fu, pulp adventure, or grindhouse, to name a few. In the end, though, all it took was a few minutes with Knights In Tight Spaces to assure me it was a good choice.
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Lock, Stock, And Two Readied Crossbows
Knights In Tight Spaces is like playing Dungeons & Dragons with Jason Statham. Each fight is a down-and-dirty brawl, where you and your team of hard-bitten antiheroes weave between enemies, deftly dodging arrows and tossing bad guys out of windows. Like its predecessor, KITS distilled the choreographed, high-octane fight scenes of action cinema into card-based tactical battles on a small grid, only this time pistol-toting secret agents are replaced with back-alley rogues and legions of skeletons.
The game’s real charm, though, comes from dialogue. The protagonist, a charismatic lowlife known on the streets as The Hustler, is brash, mouthy, and quippy in all the best ways. Their devil-may-care attitude in the face of assassins, conspiracies, and impossible odds make them a worthy leader for your old-timey Expendables, or the perfect lone wolf if you chose to try a solo run.
Sketchy Back Alleys
Visually, Knights In Tight Spaces is a big improvement over the first game, though it could stand to commit more to some of its design choices. Gone are the greyscale environments and featureless, color-coded silhouettes of its predecessor, replaced by impressively detailed backdrops to fight on, and much more detailed characters, all rendered in an impressive sketchbook style.
Therein lies the problem, though; it’s clear that the art team at Ground Shatter put a lot of effort into making their player and enemy characters alike detailed, recognizable, and above all, cool. It’s a shame, then, that all those lovely models are still left as color-coded lineart when they could be fully fleshed out, with palettes to indicate their allegiances.
Depending on the classes in play, it’s also possible to have fights where all the enemies are red and all the allies are green, which I imagine could cause some accessibility difficulties for players with certain forms of color blindness. As of the review build that I played, there aren’t any accessibility options in the game.
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Putting The Rogue In Roguelike
Knights In Tight Spaces isn’t breaking any new ground when it comes to roguelike deckbuilders as a whole, but it’s a fun, well-designed game with tons of options, and it improves on many of the original’s flaws. Secondary objectives during missions, for example, are now truly secondary; it’s nice to get an extra card or some bonus gold if you make it through a fight without getting hit, but your run isn’t dead if you go too many fights without these extra perks.
The biggest change between FITS and KITS, besides the setting, is the fact that you can now have a party of up to three characters and equip them based on their classes; this is a fantasy game, after all. Your team shares a deck, but some cards can only be used by characters with the right equipment or training; only mages can cast spells, for example, and throws can only be executed by characters who don’t have a weapon equipped.
If you’re a Fights In Tight Spaces purist, you can play a Brawler and just not recruit any party members. There are even a couple of Achievements for winning a run this way.
However, Knights In Tight Spaces isn’t a beginner’s deckbuilder. The interplay between cards, the difficulty of removing unwanted ones from your build, and the ease in which you can bloat your deck if you aren’t careful, means you’re probably going to see an awful lot of the prologue and first chapter before you have enough of a handle on combat.
You Meet In A Tavern
That brings me to the only real other issue I have; for a roguelike, the campaign progression is incredibly samey between runs. While enemy groupings and rewards are randomized, the sequence of maps that you face through each chapter is fixed. Even where you chose a forked path – a key mechanic for player agency in games like this – there’s little difference between the two other than, ‘do I want to do this fight against Attuned Tricksters in the Market or the Back Room?’
Thankfully, Knights In Tight Spaces offers daily seeds and an Endless Mode to break up the monotony of repeating the story campaign over and over, but I see those being the purview of dedicated fans, while most players will get through a few Story runs and call it a day.
For the handful of shortcomings it has, Knights In Tight Spaces is still a worthy successor to Fights In Tight Spaces, and the first deckbuilder to really catch my attention in 2025. Hopefully, this franchise will do what all the best action movies do, and continue to spawn sequel after sequel; after all, everyone loves a good fight scene.
3.5/5
Knights in Tight Spaces
Turn-Based Strategy
Digital Card Game
- ESRB
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n/a
- Developer(s)
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Ground Shatter
- Publisher(s)
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Raw Fury
- Solid deckbuiliding gameplay
- Snarky, thematic dialogue
- Equipment and party mechanics expand on the original game’s concept
- Rad soundtrack
- Story mode gets repetitive
- Character models are flat compared to the environments