Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes E3 2005 Hands-On

While last year's innovative, action-packed Xbox real-time strategy game Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders met with critical success in North America, in its native country of Korea, the game was absolutely huge, topping the charts and even outselling the likes of Halo 2. We're not surprised--we've played it. At E3, developer Phantagram is showing off a playable build of the upcoming sequel, Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes, which is scheduled for worldwide release this fall and sounds like it's going to be even better than the first one. We were fortunate to have the opportunity to spend some quality time with the game, in addition to getting all our questions answered by the producer on the title and the entire Kingdom Under Fire series (dating back to the lackluster PC RTS that blossomed into last year's outstanding game).

Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes will take place chronologically before The Crusaders, and, in an interesting twist, its main characters will be the peripheral characters from the first game. For example, one of the main characters in The Crusaders was the seasoned warrior Gerald, who fought alongside his trusted comrades Ellen and Rupert. This time around, Ellen and Rupert are major characters, while Gerald will be a secondary player in the storyline. The story will trace how the complicated events leading up to The Crusaders came to pass. Outstanding-looking character artwork and impressive in-engine cinematics quickly drew us into the world of the game, though the familiar faces certainly did too. In all, there will be seven different playable characters in the game, spread across 15 huge campaign missions. We were told to expect 30 to 50 hours of single-player content, which, judging by the amount of content in the first game, seems like a perfectly realistic estimate. That's a lot of game.

Xbox Live support will be a much bigger focal point for Heroes than The Crusaders, which offered two-player online skirmishes, but that was it. This time, up to six players can wage battle simultaneously, and a bunch of new modes will be added. There will be a hero battle mode, which sounds like a full-on deathmatch, in which players will get to slug it out as the game's various hero characters, without the support of their armies. There will also be a standard skirmish mode, though again, with up to six players in the mix, that ought to be a lot more interesting than it was in last year's game. Finally, an invasion mode will be available, which lets up to three players cooperatively attempt to defend against waves of computer-controlled enemies looking to destroy their castle. It sounds like that could be good, hectic fun.

Heroes won't be a complete overhaul of The Crusaders, which is good, since The Crusaders had a ton of great ideas and could have been even better with just a few more tweaks. Those who played The Crusaders will appreciate that Heroes will add waypoint functionality, which should let you manage your cavalry units much more easily than you could before. You don't just attack with cavalry in Kingdom Under Fire; you simply order them to run right through and bulldoze enemy troops. A new isometric camera angle has also been added, affording you with a more-strategic look at the battlefield, though it pulls away from those fantastic character graphics. We still prefer the action up close and personal. The game will also have five levels of difficulty this time around, up from the three difficulty settings in the previous title.

Like The Crusaders, Heroes will feature some massive battles with up to 200 characters onscreen at a time and as many as 3,000 individual units in combat simultaneously. Like the previous title, the game combines action and real-time strategy elements seamlessly, in that you maneuver various armies across the battlefield and, when you engage your foes, you can dive right in to control your hero unit directly in some exciting hack-and-slash combat sequences. Now the combat will be more fleshed out than before, as your heroes will have more unique moves and abilities to deal damage. We got a chance to play as the seductive vampiress Morene, who can latch onto her foes with bloodlike hooks, slam them around, or use them to launch herself through the ranks of her enemies, slashing them as she goes. Rupert, armed with a gigantic warhammer, also has some new tricks up his sleeve, such as the ability to toss his opponents high into the air and slam them on their way down.

The producer of the game explained that, while The Crusaders was about a 60/40 split between real-time strategy and action, Heroes will be the opposite--the early going should be a lot more action packed, and the RTS elements will be gradually introduced. You'll be eased into the experience, suddenly realizing how much depth there is beyond the fun, fast-paced action. On top of that, persistent role-playing elements should help give the game an overarching cohesion. Armies and heroes gain experience levels and new abilities as they fight and win battles. Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes will also feature five new types of units, for a total of 40 different unit types. An even more exciting addition is that the battlefields will be a lot more complex this time. In The Crusaders, battlefields were pretty much flat. This time, they'll have a lot more obstacles and other points of interest and will have varying height differences, which will be tactically significant. For example, we learned that archers will be able to deal more damage when firing from a height.

One last point that Kingdom Under Fire fans will appreciate is that the game will feature seven different language options on a single disc, including English and the original Korean, in addition to a new heavy metal soundtrack. The game will also feature a new title track by the famous Korean metal band The Crash, which you can hear in the game's recently released trailer. We were excited by what we got to see of Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes and eagerly look forward to playing the game later this year.