With a touch of RPG and action elements, Kingdom Under Fire allows the player to take command as one of 4 races from the forces of Light and Darkness in a struggle involving magic, brute warcraft. Kingdom Under Fire II is a video game set in a high fantasy setting developed by Blueside which merges real-time strategy (RTS), role-playing game (RPG) and massively multiplayer online game (MMO) genres - the game is to have a single player, and online multiplayer mode. The game follows on chronologically from Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom, and is the first RTS game set in the Kingdom.
By Chris Commodore |
Take an utterly conventional real-time strategy game, add a little solo dungeon crawling and throw in some fantasy themed units and you've got a real winner on your hands. At least, that must have been the reasoning behind Phantagram's latest title, Kingdom Under Fire. This game seems to offer what lots of gamers want but does so in a really lackluster way. Not that it's derivative, of course; that's a given. While some have criticized the game as a total rip-off of the Blizzard Warcraft and Diablo franchises, the game has plenty of other things going against it.
You'll be asked to command armies of knights, clerics, orcs, rangers and various other fantastic units. The units in Kingdom Under Fire gain levels through experience and can become quite formidable if you shepherd them well. As fantastic as the units seem, they're pretty commonplace. You've got the basic shock, grunt and ranged units. Unfortunately, there are also hero characters in the game that carry their experience from mission to mission. By the end of the game, they're of such high level that they tend to throw the game out of balance a bit. Supporting these units will be the same old buildings, tech trees and resource models that have become commonplace in games of this type.
The game looks pretty good for a 2D RTS. The environments and spell effects are uniformly well done and the little unit animations are cool. There's not a lot of personality in them, you understand, but they look good. I especially like the aerial units in the game. Dragons and giant eagles have been done before, but the sprites in Kingdom Under Fire are attractive enough by today's standards. I was a little ticked off that there wasn't support for resolutions higher than 800x600 as the battlefield can get a bit cramped sometimes. The cutscenes which drive the story between the missions are pretty sad compared to most of the other stuff being done today but for an RTS game, it's not all that bad. The sound work on the other hand is unanimously good. The voice work is professional and effective (although some of the unit responses get really repetitive and the soundtrack kicks most RTS games right in the behind/nuts.
I could criticize Kingdom Under Fire for an overall lack of spirit, but beyond this nebulous quality, there are some real concrete problems with the game. First and foremost, the game is too hard. I wouldn't mind so much except that the difficulty of the game has nothing to do with the state of the AI. Instead the game is made hard (grueling is a better word) for several other factors. Your hero units must stay alive through the course of the mission. This alone wouldn't be so bad if there was some sort of save game feature within the missions! Some of the later missions take up to two hours to complete satisfactorily. That alone makes Kingdom Under Fire frustrating enough; combined with the other defects it becomes much worse.
I really appreciated the game's approach to story telling. The game is told through the viewpoints of a handful of different characters, each of whom has a pretty distinct identity. In between missions, you'll get a nice voiceover explaining what the current political and military situation is and what's likely to come up next. During these briefings you also get a chance to look at map of the world and see little arrows depicting troop movements. Too bad, the scrolling text obscures the action on the map. And lots of story is revealed during the course of the missions. This really helps to provide a much more solid context for the fighting.
Apart from the way the story is told, I though the story itself was quite good. I mean, it's campy, sure, but isn't most halfway decent fantasy? And it's goofy in a totally innocent way which helps a lot. Perhaps the silliest aspect of the story is the way the characters are named -- Moonlight, Rick Blood, Likuku. Fritz Lieber this ain't. But still, this is a game that takes the time to tell you a story. A lot of RTS games just offer fight after fight with very little rhyme or reason. Kingdom Under Fire isn't the next Lord of the Rings but at least something is happening during the game.
I guess I should say just a little about the story itself. The land of Bersiah was witness to a great battle between good and evil a century ago. A whole group of good guys got together and beat the crap out of the big evil thing that was threatening the world. Now 100 years later, the orcs and ogres are once again on the move and it's up to you to either lead them or defeat them in the game's two campaigns. Each campaign consists of 13 missions (10 strategic battles, and 3 dungeon crawls). There are a lot of parallelisms between the two campaigns as they each tell two sides of the same story. In some of the missions, the maps, events and triggers are all the same regardless of which side you're on. While it was cool to get the new perspective on the action, it also kind of took away some of the surprises once you realized you'd already played the mission from the other side. All of the missions involve you completely eradicating your enemy from the map. Sadly the maps are designed with numerous choke points and causeways that make it a real defender's dream.
This exposes yet another set of faults in the AI. First off, the defensive nature of the maps makes it really easy to turn away computer attacks. The enemy AI tends to send units against you in very small groups. By the time you've built your own Maginot Line, you'll barely even need to worry about base defense. Just keep a few peasants around to repair your guard towers and you're set. The pathfinding (which isn't great anyway) suffers even more from all the twists and turns in the landscape. Frequently units will get stuck behind trees, rock spurs or, even worse, your own units. This can make coordinating large battles a real pain in the ass as you suddenly realize that all of your archers are stuck on a bridge and don't know how to get off.
Each campaign also comes with three Diablo-style dungeon crawls. While it sounds really cool to take your generals on short side adventures to gain experience and items, these are probably the least exciting moments in the whole game. Dull, dull, dull. The levels are uninteresting, the challenge level is low, and the tedium is high. In fact, the only thing that the RPG sections of the game are good for are for gaining levels and grabbing items. But even then there's a problem. You can gain levels just as easily during the strategy portion of the game and the items, while useful, are so horribly generic that you won't care. And the few named weapons in the game are diminished by their numbers. Oh look, another Excalibur -- guess I'll throw this other one away. As if that wasn't bad enough, there just isn't all that much action. I mean, Diablo might have been repetitive, but at least something was happening. Wow. Dj vu.
It's less of an issue for me that Kingdom Under Fire seems like a copy of Blizzard's heavy hitters. Lots of games are alike and if one company has a good idea, then why shouldn't other developers start copying it? No, my big problem with Kingdom Under Fire isn't its lack of originality -- it's the lack of inspiration that went into the imitation. While it's certainly a good game, nothing about it stands out as great. Fans of fantasy strategy would do better to wait for Warcraft III, which should be out soon. You can have your robot servant drive you to the software store in your rocket car.
-- Steve Butts
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