King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame Review

The sword in the stone, the lady in the lake, and the knights of the round table are all present and accounted for in King Arthur: The Role-playing Wargame. But this mix of role-playing, real-time strategy, and turn-based grand strategizing doesn't quite work out as smoothly as the infamous accident that resulted in Mr. Reese's blending of peanut butter with chocolate. Hungarian developer NeoCore Games has created a compelling epic here that delves deep into Arthurian legend and builds a strong fantasy role-playing atmosphere but at the expense of some of the strategy. So even while you can easily get hooked on guiding King Arthur to the throne of Britain by vanquishing enemy monarchs and negotiating with watery tarts throwing swords at you, taking armies into battle is more problematic because of balance issues and grueling difficulty in the campaign. While the overall game is well worth playing because of the outstanding development of the Arthurian theme and some innovations on both the role playing and strategy sides of the fence, the flaws that mount up after a while will leave you hoping for a patch.

Real-time battles in King Arthur draw from many inspirations, including the Total War series.

In the beginning, however, King Arthur is one impressive game. Visuals strike you right away. The rolling green fields of the countryside and the sunshine glimmering off the sea really provide an old English atmosphere. The detailed soldier models and the ability to zoom in for close-ups of battles also lend wargame credibility. It's all a bit more grim than one would expect from a King Arthur game, with a Warhammer influence evident in the painted art seen on loading screens, although it still sets a great dark mood. Only the occasional typos in the onscreen text, along with the forgettable music and sparse voice samples detract from the otherwise immersive atmosphere. And even then, the game sometimes surprises you with some spooky sound effects during battles or when scrolling across the map screen of Britain.

Basic gameplay is at first reminiscent of the Total War series or even a more hardcore game of grand strategy, such as the Europa Universalis franchise. You take on the role of King Arthur himself in the single-player campaign (one-off skirmish scenarios and multiplayer battles are also offered, although the meat of the game is in the campaign) and must work to unite all of Britain by using turn-based tactical moves on a countrywide map screen consisting of numerous provinces. The strategic component of the game should be pretty familiar to most players. Most of your time is spent building up armies by recruiting in towns that you control, shuffling them around the map to attack rivals, and expanding your kingdom. Running your empire has been streamlined in a straightforward system that sees you advance through a season of the year in each turn. Recruiting new soldiers is handled by simply heading to a town with enough citizens to press into your service. Troop types are relatively standardized, with the expected mix of axemen, cavalry, spearmen, bowmen, and the like. All gain experience and level up, though, so you can customize your armies by buffing skills--such as attack, defense, or shooting accuracy--during the winter turn when attacks are halted while everybody hunkers down to wait out the snow. Managing the economy is also a snap because you only have to look after a pair of automatically collected resources in food and gold.

Quests play out almost exactly like Choose Your Adventure books from the '80s.

Battles themselves take place whenever two armies clash on the map. At this point, the action shifts to a real-time battlefield where you maneuver columns of troops and deploy them with basic formation commands. Battles play out just as they do in other similar strategy games, albeit with a couple of interesting innovations. Attacking, for instance, gives you the option to choose a specific battlefield. This lets you decide if you're going to fight in a forest, on an open plain, amidst hills, and so forth. This can be very useful because the game gives pluses and minuses to attack, as well as defense calculations based on terrain (as an example, you can launch surprise attacks from the woods). But perhaps the most rewarding new feature here is the addition of victory locations to every map. Each battlefield comes with a handful of key strategic spots that can be captured to provide boosts to your overall army morale (which can fall enough to trigger the loss of a battle even if your numbers remain strong, so you have to keep a close eye on how it ebbs and flows).

Battlefields also include specific buffs, as well as access to special healing abilities and spells. So these locations provide both in-game rewards and ways to emphasize the tactical importance of certain areas on each map. These locations always make perfect sense. They can be found on high ground or in buildings, such as old churches and Stonehenge-like stone circles, in critical places on a map--sites that any army would naturally attempt to seize at the onset of a battle. Going after such multiple objectives typically presents you with a tactical challenge because you need to divide your forces and tackle at least three victory locations simultaneously to have a hope of winning most battles. This really makes you think first instead of just band-selecting everybody and hurling your army at the enemy en masse.