RPGWatch Forums - King Arthur II - Reviews @ Out of Eight, Destructoid, Hooked Gamers

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King Arthur II - Reviews @ Out of Eight, Destructoid, Hooked Gamers

Here's a trio of King Arthur II reviews, with a wide spread of results.
First, Out of Eight says 4/8:

Quote:

The Good: Magic and monsters make tactical battles marginally more interesting, forging items is neat, nice graphics
The Not So Good: Campaign map mode features entirely scripted pre-built mandatory missions and no kingdom management, tedious story-based quests, chaotic battles leave little room for tactics, terrible interface, superficial and limited diplomatic options, dim AI, odd tactical map design, no multiplayer, severe performance issues for some
What say you? A linear, shallow campaign and underdeveloped tactical battles make this fantasy game fade into history: 4/8

Destructoid also notes a linear campaign and combat issues, for a score of 7/10:

Quote:

In many cases, progress is made by simply walking from battle to battle without really having any choice where you want to strike next. There are a few instances where a quest can be completed by taking over a few provinces in any order as long as you defeat the quest objective's army, but the overworld is largely reduced to a visual representation of getting from target to target for progression's sake. Many provinces are defended by "impossible" strength armies that have highly inflated stats, making them unbeatable until you've progressed through enough storyline quests to be permitted to fight them. When you do progress far enough, the game's "military advancement" tech tree automatically goes up by one level and all your units — existing units included — are upgraded to more a powerful class, while the impossible armies now suddenly have more manageable stats.

On the other hand, Hooked Gamers obviously enjoyed it, wth a score of 8.5/10:

Quote:

Like its predecessor before it, King Arthur II: The Role-Playing Wargame successfully melds role-play, adventure, diplomatic and combat elements into a cohesive, one of a kind experience. The additions and changes make the game feel almost as fresh as its predecessor and discovering them is almost an adventure by itself.

More information.

Ai, that sounds bad.
Was looking forward to play this game.

Anyone here played it yet?

Don't know what to make of this game yet. The reviews have been all over the place and not just these three.

I'll wait a while. They had some issues with KA in the beginning, but they ironed them out with patches. I'm pretty sure the same thing will happen here.

I've finished it. There's a demo. Just imagine playing that about 60 times with slightly differing forces (more mystical and air units for example) split up by entertaining little text adventures. The one thing that wasn't apparent to me is that there's no strategy layer, so don't buy it for a Total War experience.

I agree with Alistair. The reviewer that calls the text-quests tedious must be a real console-kiddie, most of them take maybe around two minutes to finish. On the other hand, that reviewer probably never learned how to read and has to actually listen to the entire text quest (I actually wish you could turn those voiceovers off. Not that they're bad, I just prefer reading. It's alot faster…)

The linearity is kind of a bummer though, I would have prefered a more sand-box approach. It probably would have made the game harder to balance, but it would have been more fun to play.

Still a good game though, but I've got my hopes up for expansions with more sandbox-style play. AND text-quest. In the first game they got the sandbox right with the expansion, but removed the text-quests!