Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders - Review

Added November 4th, 2004 by Colin

Introduction:

In the game industry as of late there has been a massive lack of truly original titles. Everything now seems to boil down into a basic genre, without the same innovation there used to be. There was a point where the entire concept of First Person Shooter was groundbreaking, now it’s a mainstay of the industry, bringing in hundreds of millions a year. Then came the Real Time Strategy games, the Role Playing games, and then everything splintered into more and more specific categories… from First Person Sneakers to Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying and everything in-between. That was 5 years ago, since then the genres have been fairly stagnant, not much innovation, not much experimentation with new types of games, which is precisely what makes Kingdom Under Fire so unique: it’s different. It defies categoration. Is it a beat em up slasher game? Is it a strategy game? The answer lies somewhere in between, but unfortunately it winds up doing neither exceptionally well, and settling for average.

Gameplay:

Kingdom Under Fire has three main sections of gameplay: up close Dynasty Warrior-esque combat, troop movement and coordination, and the preparation of said troops in the town screen. As you enter a mission, you are given control of a few squads of troops, or one in some situations. One of those squads then has a hero unit, which in turn has officers which can be called upon in battle to aid your hero in close battle, which I’ll get to in a minute. Movement of squads is akin to Full Spectrum Warrior, simply move the left thumbstick and a cursor will out from your troops, at which point you can hit A to move the squad you have selected, or Y to have all your squads head to that point. Unfortunately, however, the cursor movement fails to retain the smoothness and naturalness of Full Spectrum Warrior’s movement, the cursor is hard to see at times, the camera fails to keep up on occasion, and overall movement is a pain. Thankfully, hitting L brings up a minimap in the upper-right hand corner which you can use to move squads around more easily, and set up coordinated movements between separate squads, which proves useful for positioning spearmen in the face of a cavalry onslaught. Overall, the control while moving troops around turns into grab your units and throw them at the enemy, then pray that your hero is powerful to defeat the other hero. This is very unfortunate, since this phase of the game could have very well been the highlight. Instead, it is simply average with some poor controls.

The second phase of combat occurs when the squad with your hero character engages an enemy squad causing a beat em up battle to take place, allowing you to run your hero around the battle, slashing enemies and pulling off special moves using Skill Points. These Skill Points are gained through the killing of enemy squads, infantry, heroes, cavalry, and pretty much everything positive that you do. These Skill Points can be used to do high damage, high radius attacks, call for help from your officers, and do other specials, like short range archer attacks, which adds a great amount of depth to the fighting engine of the game. Unfortunately, the rest of it doesn’t have the same level of polish as the Skill Point system. The combat engine is shallow, the controls are hit and miss, and it is difficult to control the rest of the battle without sacrificing your hero in the process. The controls are far and away the biggest problem with the combat, as you will often find them just “laggy” enough that you will often miss an enemy or opportunity to block, which leads to some frustration in the combat mode. However, the fighting is good mindless fun, just not as deep and strategic as you would expect.

The final section of gameplay takes town in-between missions while in town, where you are able to manage your army through unit upgrades, skills, and equipment, as well as going through a few quick tutorial levels to teach the movement basics. Everything in town is handled through a simple text based menu, which isn’t very visually appealing and will turn off some to the fairly deep customization options that lie underneath. Some of these options include different types of armor and weapons, some of which come with bonuses to attack and damage. Among the other options are customizing your hero with abilities, which can be used during fights to help turn the tide of battle. All of these upgrades are bought using cash and skill points earned during battle, encouraging players to fight and play hard during fights. In the end, though, these features are all great in concept but, like much of the rest of the game, are not implemented to their fullest extent. They are hard to navigate, and when the whole feature set of the mode revolves around navigation that is a very big issue. A Counter-Strike style “pie” menu would have gone far to fix this issue, but unfortunately the game settles for the older, less functional, and downright archaic text menus, when there are far better mechanisms available.

Missions in game consist mostly of hunt and destroy levels, but the sheer numbers involved in some of them are what separates the battles in Kingdom Under Fire from other games. Players will find themselves traveling from deserts to forests to everything in between, and some missions will have you assaulting enemy strongholds and massive walls. The final main point for KUF’s Gameplay is its Xbox Live mode, which is one of the best conceptualized Live game modes released to date. Unfortunately, however, it also suffers from poor implementation, bad menus, and lag. In Live you will create a profile for Live play only, completely separate from Single Player, and in the multiplayer only profile players start out with a basic army and over time and experience can upgrade that army into a veritable force. The downside to this is that oftentimes new players playing on new profiles will be matched with far more advanced players, and being beaten down by a level 30 hero for a first battle isn’t my idea of fun. Though lag is not terrible on its own, it adds just enough to the inherent lack of control response that combat is extremely difficult, which just makes the whole Live mode frustrating.

Graphics:

Kingdom Under Fire’s graphics are a sight to behold, as the art direction is truly something to behold. The unit detail is fantastic considering the amount of units (up to 150 onscreen at a time!), and nice considerations such as a fur coat on one of the hero characters really helps to bring out the graphics. Textures are fairly bland, but they are more then made up for by great environments, which include some fantastic grass and lens flare effects. And, speaking of lens flare, one of the neat parts of the game is that archers facing the sun will be far less accurate, and you tell if they are facing the wrong decision through how the shadows fall, which all comes together to make for a great effect, with a cool impact on gameplay. Overall graphics in Kingdom Under Fire are fantastic, except for the menus described in the paragraph above, and are far and away one of the best features of Kingdom Under Fire.

Audio:

If we had an award for strangest audio choices it would have go to Kingdom Under Fire for its decision to have speed metal as the music of choice. Now, I love metal as much as the next game, but it completely goes against the game’s feel, and players’ expectations. When playing a game that included medieval weaponry, orchestral music is usually used just because that’s what works. You don’t hear Nirvana during Lord of the Rings, not because Nirvana isn’t a great band, but because it just doesn’t work. Unfortunately, Phantagram didn’t seem to get the memo. The rest of the sound effects are fair, with the notable exception of the voice acting, which is absolutely horrendous, as it is one of the worst dubbing jobs I have ever heard while playing any game, ever. Players would be well advised to turn off the dubbing, at which point the dialogue sounds much better. Overall, audio is average edging towards bad.

Controls:

Kingdom Under Fire features a great control scheme that has all the features necessary to make a great Xbox strategy game. You have the Full Spectrum Warrior movement keyset, with left trigger to move around units on a minimap, and a fighting layout that maps functions to easily accessible points. Unfortunately, all that is ruined by control lag and a bad movement cursor.

Replay:

Kingdom Under Fire features a long single player mode that is sure to keep people playing for a long time, and the many different heroes, all of which have different characteristic fighting methods, sweetens the deal. It is unfortunate that the Xbox Live functionality was botched, as that would have increased the replay value tenfold. Overall, the replay is great on the single player side, but in the long run brought down by the lack of good multiplayer

Summary:

Kingdom Under Fire isn’t a bad game. It’s not a great game. It’s a good game that has some unique, cool, genre defining, and genuinely refreshing ideas. Unfortunately, many of these are not implemented as well as they could have, but then again, many original titles have trouble getting it right the first time. First Person Shooters started years before Doom, yet they did not hit quite the right balance to take off. That didn’t mean that they were bad games, it just means that they hadn’t had time to be polished yet. And so it is with Kingdom Under Fire: a good game with great ideas, just waiting to be polished. There is a fantastic AAA title just waiting to be unearthed here, and I hope that Phantagram realizes that and gives it another go, and if they do I will be the first in line to buy it.