This is just plain ridiculous - I struggled with the first King Arthur game, but this one is just as bad
I love strategy games, I played Company of Heroes for something like 4 years, was top 100 in Shogun Total War (got bored after 2-3 months), and so I thought, what the hell, not many strategy games coming out, I'll check this out - maybe they have gotten it right this time.
Seriously, these guys just don't get the hint, or maybe they are just out to make a quick buck.
Graphics - same as first one
Crap controls / camera angles - same
Gameplay - slight improvement
Overall impression - fail
I honestly can't believe how they could fail with such a great concept and money to invest. They probably have an evil genius on payroll. And I honestly wanted to like this game. I'll try to sum up what's so utterly screwed up about it:
- Money only comes from completing missions - i.e. no new gold per turn. That's right. You have to fight / complete missions to get new gold, no matter how many provinces you hold
- That means if you have to really carefully manage your army, i.e. losing units / repairing them is a constant drain on your fixed amount of gold you can get from the campaign
- So, you have to be good at combat to preserve cash. Frankly, combat just plain sucks! In every possible term. Rock / paper / scissors of the most basic variety, inf/spear/archer/horse/hero, but which all get jumbled together as soon as battle starts with no possibility of telling your or enemy units apart. So you basically get two (if you're lucky 3) big mosh pits with 5-10 units on each side just duking it out, and it's just somehow not fun, I really don't get it why, but it's just not fun! Voiceover keeps saying "Your unit is about to die..." "Your men are about to die..." --- and they are not! I'm at 70 men out of 80, and it keeps saying "Your men are about to die..."! It's so annoying it's unbelievable! To sum up that's the typical background noise during a battle - "Your opponent is casting a spell... Your men are about to die... Your unit is about to die... You have won the battle!"
- Same gold goes towards role-playing missions. These are very fun, remind me of MUDs of old, and frankly I like the text-based adventure component of the game. But choices require gold, that you need to win through battles or quests, and to win battles you need soldiers that require gold. Full circle.
Basically, the concept of this game, is mind boggling - it has potential to be absolutely amazing. How they have managed to implement it so poorly is beyond my comprehension. I gave them 10 for the concept, 0 for the effort, so 5.0 seems about right.
Such a shame - and I'm not even talking about my money.
I really doubt Gamespot will give them above 7.0 review.
Bye, thanks for reading, going back to SWTOR. It may not be perfect, leveling is way too easy, but seriously the slight difference in sound my various light sabers make is just priceless - I never thought you would want to spend time in a game just to get a lightsaber that _sounds_ better!