pretty complex gameplay, some unfairly hard quests, average battles, but very enjoyable and addictive campaign map
This game mixes the 'Total War' formula with 'Heroes of Might and Magic' and takes the fun elements from Total War games, couples them heroes and magic, and adds a little bit of classic "Choose Your Adventure" style text role playing. Combining RPG and total war games not only makes the campaign more interesting and fun, but also gives it a higher replayability.
this is not a game that immediately reveals itself. It will require few hours of play before you feel compelled to play it out of your own desire. This will undoubtedly drive away a lot of players which is a shame because the game becomes much more enjoyable after few hours. So, if you pass the learning curve, this game is very fun and addictive. It has a lot of similarities to total war, but gives a bit more reason and story line which adds to the fun.
The game is set on Arthurian Britannia, and you take the role of King Arthur. King Arthur, trying to take over the land and unite it under 1 king. You control your armies through the Knights of the Round Table, and you use them both to conquer new territories or complete quests. you wage war in summer, spring and autumn, and winter is when all units make camp to level up and you are left to attend to making laws, researching and building in your strongholds.
You can have a maximum of 12 knights leading your armies. armies can only move when they are with a leader(I didn't like this part). Along the way you will be given quest that your knights of the round table can undertake that will affect their alignment towards Good/Evil and Pegan/Christian religion. Each of your knights can govern up to 3 settlements and their personality traits will give you different positive/negative effects for the provinces that they govern.
The gameplay,like total wars, have two part: turn base map and battles. The battles also have a new feature:victory locations. These grant various bonuses like spells or stamina regeneration to the ones that capture them, in addition to slowly draining the enemy morale.
The combat animations are a bit rough, but nothing detrimental to the overall experience. the battles are almost consistently the same, with very little variation and AI is not very good. The units were far too small and you can't individualize them until 'zoom in' to them. Battle Graphics are not as good as Total War but, they are still nice. the unit size of the armies is rather small, at least compared to the Total War series.
And the main problem; this game is Very HARD even on the easiest difficulty setting and there are some overpowered units. enemies will probably have several maxed out armies of end-game units by the time you even reach half of the unit tree. Some of these enemy units can destroy half of your army!!! Some magic creatures move very fast and before you can order your army to move, they capture half of victory points!!! So, for finish this game, you must be a "game master" or you have to use trainers.
Army units are very important in King Arthur. You must be careful not to lose them other wise all the levels you gained with them will be gone. Some troops are special and are very hard to come by. A good strategy to win the battles is send two horsemans to capture victory points and fight to enemy troops with rest of your units. In most battles, enemies don't protect their victory points and you can capture them. Arrow units are very overpowered, if you have more than 6 archer groups over a hill(specially hidden in trees), you almost can beat any opponents.
The game runs smoothly on my system but There are still some bugs in the game. The soundtracks are very good. campaign map is beautiful and the units are looking well detailed. somthing I felt when I was playing the game(maybe I'm wrong) is lack of color variety in environment. Both campaign map and battlefields seems too "light green" and "yellow" and sometimes it takes a few seconds until you can find something you want.
Overall, this game definitely worth to try and if it wasn't very hard and battles were better(at least like old Rome total war), it's deserving of high 8's or even 9's.