King Arthur II – The Role-Playing Wargame (PC)

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key review info
  • Game: King Arthur II - The Role-playing Wargame
  • Platform: PC
  • Show system requirements
  • Gamepad support: No
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As men stand shoulder to shoulder, pikes ready, I find myself thinking about how much pain someone can feel when ripped apart by a flying demon-bird. This is the sort of question that King Arthur II – The Role-Playing Wargame brings to the mind of a gamer who knows a little too much about how a weapon can rip through the human body.

I set my initial formation and then rush towards a tactically sound position, flanked by two mountains and in the camouflage offered by woods. I am ready to fight the demons. My army pauses and I ask myself whether fantasy commanders really cared about position and flanking or whether they only sought to instill a strong morale among their own men and then allowed the blood frenzy to take over. This is another question that King Arthur II can answer via gameplay.

I finish this battle pretty quickly, taking losses because I mistimed some spells and allowed enemy cavalry to get to my archers. As I contemplate the battlefield, another question appears: is King Arthur II, developed by Neocore Games and published by Paradox Interactive, really a role-playing wargame or a directed series of battles with interwoven text adventures?

Story

It’s a surprise that the legend of King Arthur has not been exploited in video gaming more before Neocore Games launched the first game based on it, given the fact that it delivers relatable high-fantasy concepts, heroes, maidens, battles and a universe that is not as overused as, say, that of Tolkien or the Dungeons & Dragons series.

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Demon battle
Ready for more adventure

King Arthur II – The Role-Playing Wargame picks up after the events of the original, with Britannia a land at peace, united, with the Knights of the Round Table ready to defend it from threats and Guinevere giving the King the love he needs after his trials.  [admark=1]

The peace of the land is quickly shattered as a new race of demons is unleashed while the Knights themselves are scattered and the King is unable to lead his men because of a wound that never closes.

Arthur’s son needs to step in and save the day, and in King Arthur II, through a mix of both strategy and role playing, the developers manage to tell a gripping tale of betrayal, struggle, heroism and intrigue, which has its roots well implanted in the Arthurian legend. It also gets the freedom to deliver new characters, a gray moral space and some truly interesting enemies.

King Arthur II is much more concerned with narrative than the first game from Neocore, and there are many well-crafted text adventures for gamers to explore and enjoy. Gamers who do not like to read will be disappointed to hear this, but most of them require careful understanding of the presented facts and then ask the player to make a choice that leads to rewards, battles or some piece of new information about the game world.

The mini text adventures might seem a little at odds with the rest of the game, with its focus on strategy, but they manage to provide much-needed variety (I wish Total War had something similar) and do a great job of fleshing out the game universe.

Gameplay

Many people would accuse the developers at Neocore Games of simply taking the Total War formula and adding a bit of medieval and fantasy flavor in order to create their own franchise. But a closer look at King Arthur II shows that this game is a very different and, in many ways, innovative beast.

The strategy layer is much more focused than in the Creative Assembly series, mainly because King Arthur II uses quests to guide the player around the game world. This reduces the actual freedom one has but makes the game flow smoother, always focused on a long-term objective while side quests provide momentary distractions.

There are also more role-playing elements that forge a closer bond between gamer, units and heroes. Wives can be assigned, provinces need to find suitable lords, and each hero has a set of skills that gives him a unique role on the battlefield, with a big demarcation line between sages, fighters and warlords.

Strangely, I found myself very much interested in my units and their evolution both in quantitative ways, with points and abilities added as they get more battlefield experience, and in terms of quality, with more evolved forms appearing as the story progresses.

One major change is how buildings and research are integrated into the strategic layer. Now there are buildings scattered on the Britannia map and each of them can get upgrades that directly affect units or abilities. Development is limited to choosing between types of bonuses, and high-level buildings can only be created after also doing some research.

There’s a nice interplay here between provinces, their potential for upgrades, the wives that each character can get and their preferred units types. Despite this I miss the management system from the first King Arthur, where the castles were massive and rare structures that really made the player feel like a king when building and upgrading. Harvests and upgrades are also more limited and it feels like the streamlining might have eliminated some of the charm that the first title had.

I also expected more of an evolution from the battles themselves. The strategic points are now less important and there’s a new mechanic of magic resistance that makes combat-oriented heroes better able to stand up to magic users.

The biggest change is the way the environments are built. The mountains are very high, the ravines deep and very tight, and many battles tend to become a matter of throwing units at each other, with limited space for enveloping and flanking. It sometimes makes the strategy cheaper than it should be.

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Moral ruler
Battle ready

One thing all potential players need to keep in mind is that King Arthur II takes a lot of time to load. The problem is annoying and mostly appears when transitioning in and out of the battles. This is the rare game where the level of fun can be increased by having a book or a newspaper nearby to enjoy during those long-loading screens.

Graphics and audio

The island of Britain is beautiful during the fall, all muted green and daring browns, but the mood worsens as the beauty disappears with the arrival of winter, as whole armies are locked in camps and nobody is ready for war. King Arthur II manages to create a very strong link between its visual identity and its core gameplay mechanics, something that strategy games rarely manage to do.

The graphics quality is very close to what Total War: Shogun 2 delivered last year, which is quite high praise given the more limited resources used here. The strategic map looks crisp and detailed and the various characters and artwork are beautiful. Everything feels appropriate given the mix between actual history and fantasy that the second King Arthur delivers.

The battlefields are also well rendered and most units can be quickly identified by their looks. The quality drops a little when it comes to animations, which lack any sort of variation, and to the quality of some of the props, from grass to trees.

The sound design might just be the element of King Arthur II that received the less amount of improvement when compared to the first game in the series. The music is appropriate enough, given the mix between fantasy and history, and the battle sounds manage to convey the clash of big men wearing iron that try to cut each other open with steel. But the sounds fail to draw me into the game world and seem to lack the attention bestowed on the art style.

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Personal power
Adventure text

The main narrator is one of the highlights of the sound design in King Arthur II, able to convey a sense of both desperation and hope with his slight accent, lending the passages that he acts out much more of an emotional impact than a simple text would have.


The Good

  • Arthurian atmosphere
  • Text adventures
  • Morality choices

The Bad

  • Altitude on battlefields
  • Lack of castle control
  • Some performance issues

Conclusion

King Arthur II is a worthy extension of the ideas that Neocore Games pioneered in the first title of the series and is a solid strategy game that will fill many hours for all fans of the genre. The positives include exciting battles, an engaging strategic layer and solid presentation and atmosphere. The main drawbacks are the lack of castles and the somewhat linear nature of the experience.

Unfortunately, the game seems in a kind of rough shape right now. A number of players are reporting glitches, crashes and bugs, although I have only experienced some problems with missing text and descriptions. Gamers also need to make sure that they have a solid machine before buying King Arthur II because the game is badly optimized for some PC setups. The best idea would be to give the demo a try and see how the game performs before buying.

I’m sure that the development team at Neocore Games will improve the experience of playing King Arthur II – The Role–Playing Wargame in the coming weeks and months and deliver more content for it. So if you like the Arthurian legends and strategy, do yourself a favor and pick this game up.

I planned on giving King Arthur II an 8.5 purely for the gameplay because I personally experienced no game breaking bugs, but after taking a good look at the forums for the game I decided to take on point off the top for the amount of reported problems.

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story 9
gameplay 7
concept 10
graphics 8
audio 9
multiplayer 0
final rating 7.5
Editor's review
good
 
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