Early Hours with…Kingdom Under Fire
No save for you! The first mission is extremely simple. Herd a few villagers into the mountains and you've done it. That's why I didn't notice the game's glaring deficiency until the second mission. Remember the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld? It seems like developers are turning into Save Nazis. My copy of Kingdom Under Fire came without documentation, so I was sure that I had to be missing an option to save my game in the middle of a mission. I mean, who would design an RTS game that can have you build for an hour in a mission, only to lose it because you get reckless with a hero and let him die, and not allow you to save!?! Phantagram, apparently. I finally checked GOD's forums and saw a message confirming that you can only save after you complete a mission. That's right, there is no in-mission save. You can only save after you successfully complete a mission. Believe you me, this is more than enough reason to avoid this game. I played the first long mission three times. The first because I made a few mistakes. The second time because I had the mission more or less won and foolishly allowed my soprano-singing hero Curian to be killed. Finally, the third time was the charm. Still, I wasted a couple of hours on the previous attempts. Games that require building and patience to finish a level should allow you to save as often as you want. It's a big black mark against KUF that it doesn't. The Romulus and Remus of RTS games: Pathfinding and skirmish AI I think there are two traits that RTS games should be founded on. Pathfinding and skirmish AI. Give me those, and you have a solid start. Unfortunately KUF never gets off to a solid start. Pathfinding is problematic. Most of the time it works, but "most of the time" isn't good enough. Far too often a path is blocked by other units, and rather than have them move out of the way, the units just stop. KUF is tile-based too, so it often looks like there's room to get by and there really isn't. That's not the end of it though. They can also get stuck in shrubbery. It's ridiculous. My barbarian who has skewered dozens of orcs with his badass Gillette vorpal blade gets hung up in a bush. Cut the goddamn bush down! You're a barbarian! Sheesh! If the pathfinding is irritating, the skirmish AI is more disappointing than an Ed McMahon lookalike who appears at your door to serve you with a subpoena instead of a multimillion dollar check, but that's fodder for another story. I played three skirmish games. In the first game I played for 45 minutes and the AI never attacked, and then the game locked up. The second time the AI did attack me early and beat me. Good for it. The third time we had several battles and then the AI mysteriously stopped in its tracks. It had a nice base, peons, and resources to mine, but it just froze and let me build at my leisure and destroy it. I waltzed in and slaughtered its peons and destroyed its buildings, and that was that. Of course, poor pathfinding and skirmish AI is not all KUF offers. It also has Diablo-like levels.
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