Until last year Blizzard Entertainment tried to convince us that Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos was the first RTS/RPG in history, introducing the RPS concept (role-playing strategy). Besides the fact this proved not to be true they forgot that the first games of this type were Rage of Mages and Rival Realms belonging to the Romanians from Active Pub. The first true RPS will be Knight Shift, a beta version we received from Zuxxez Entertainment convinced me of that.

The game is a combination between RTS and RPG and you can see this even from the menu. Besides the usual options in a strategy game (single-player, skirmish and multiplayer), Knight Shift can be played from a RPG perspective which reminded me of Dungeon Siege and Neverwinter Nights. The single-player mode has three campaigns totaling 24 missions, some non-linear, whose main character is prince Mirko who must defeat the forces of evil that took him away from his throne. Besides main quests like killing a dragon or the evil Valtamand, Mirko gets a series of mini-quests like finding three kids or some runes and crystals, freeing a character or defending a village from wolves or witches.
In the beginning you will control just Mirko but later on you'll get other characters that you can maneuver just like in other strategy games: you can create teams that can be arranged in formations, you can order them to attack, sneak or sleep. The life of each character is regained in time, a higher speed being obtained with the use of some artifacts. Still, the most efficient method is to order them to sleep, the speed being four times faster if of course there are no animals or enemies nearby.
These teams are in the same time parties, just like in RPG games, because each character can advance through levels by gaining experience and improving qualities like health point, armor, damage, range. These values can be considerably increased by using artifacts they wear. As sometimes I could transfer just a limited number of troops from one mission to another I did my best no to lose units and this proved to be really useful later. All these and also the fact that characters have names contribute to their individualization and to the increase of player's attachment to them, just like in a pure RPG.