Early Hours with…Kingdom Under Fire
Diablo wannabe After playing through a couple of the campaign levels, Curian gets to deliver a letter to a former ally who has decided to not acknowledge the king's rule and help him fight the orcs. Sounds like a setup, doesn't it? Yep, sure enough, Curian is in the castle when <gasp!> the former ally decides to attack him because the king's army has also marched up. This then springs upon us the Diablo-like portion of KUF. The RTS game engine is used for these levels, but the view is scooted in a bit so everything's bigger — about the size of figures in Diablo, if you can imagine! The engine does do some nice work with lighting, and the figures are well-animated, but the graphics are still a bit too dark and fuzzy for my taste. But that's the good part. Your heroes (and regular units too) gain experience and go up levels and get tougher, but it's tough to keep track of this during the game and ends up being rather meaningless, as a result. The gameplay in this level just crawls.The level is relatively unpopulated compared to the hyperactive Diablo games you're used to, yet you still have to dutifuly check every nook and cranny for healing potions, because it's impossible to complete the level without them. And remember, you cannot save. There's no portalling to town to get healed, buy potions, and so on. Even with this, I supposed I could have liked the Diablo touch if the gameplay was fun. It's not. It's tedious. The controls just aren't as crisp and responsive as they are in Diablo, so the feedback isn't there. You just don't get that wonderul hack and soul-satisfying slash gameplay in KUF that you get in Diablo. The RTS gameplay is adquate if you get around the lack of a save, but the Diablo level is really a gamekiller, at least for me. It made me want to discontinue playing the game. That's how irritating it was. So is there fun to be had in Kingdom Under Fire? I guess that's the real question. The RTS engine is decent and the graphics, while not good as I had hoped from viewing screenshots in previews over the past months, were passable. The game does have an unusually high number of frames of animation, and for some units it really shows the game off well, like the grouchy dwarven bombadiers who unsling their cannons from their backs, slam them on the grounds, and them fire them. I'd have to say that in my experience with the game — four or so of the campaign levels and a few skirmishes against the AI — it's just subpar as a single-player experience. Multiplayer is probably what can save this game, and indeed it might even be quite a bit of fun that way. Phantagram even has their own version of a Battle.net matching service, but it rejected my CD key for some reason. C'est la guerre. I hate to weigh in with a sense of finality about this game since I haven't played it to the end, but I've played it as far as I'm going to. KUF feels like a game that was inspired by Warcraft II and Diablo, but somewhere along the way combining those two game types resulted in a finished product that has too many problems — poor pathfinding, spotty skirmish AI, the lack of an in-mission save, and the Diablo-like level that just didn't work for me. It's too bad too, because I really wanted to like it. Agree? Disagree? Post comments in our forum.
Publisher: Gathering of Developers January 13, 2001 |
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