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American Cover
With their continuation of Kingdom Under Fire, Phantagram/Blueside managed to turn a perfectly boring off-the-mill RTS into a very interesting mixture of tactical games like Myth or Warhammer with the hack & slay of Dynasty Warriors. In four campaigns players alternately fight for the humans or the dark legion, commanding up to five regiments of footmen, archers, cavalry, sappers and even monsters and war machines, all with their individual strength that tend to cancel each other out rock, paper & scissors style. The game initially also supported online multiplayer modes, but since the servers have been shut down, they're not available, anymore.
The controls might feel a bit unintuitive at first, but once one handles to use the map to order units around effectively, one will learn in no time to flank the approaching enemies with cavalry, set out traps before they reach the infantry, and cut off the reinforcements by setting the woods on fire with the archers. There's a lot of attention to minute details, so archers have to be positioned so that they never face the sun, elves slowly get healed in the woods and terrain has a direct effect on the battle.
A lot of the tactical finesse is cancelled out, however, when your main unit approaches the enemy, then it's time to hack about with the current campaign's hero directly, complete with special moves. There's always two lieutenants in the same regiment that can be called for even more devastating attacks. All special moves and spells cost action points, which are recharged in melee or by using the designated specialities of each regiment. Unfortunately, the skirmishes often boil down to finding and eliminating the enemy leader as fast as possible, after that the hostile regiment will back down in no time.
In between missions the game's RPG elements come into play, as experience and money from the battle can be invested into better equipment and skills that allow for class changes in the troops. Here the humans are very flexible as any regiment can take any job with the right leader, while the dark legion troops are strictly divided between orcish and dark elven leaders, which poses more limitation and forces more frequent use of the other option, the hiring of mercenaries. While the introductory missions (specifically the greater part of the first campaign) dictate the troops to the player, the selection gets more and more liberal, so hired mercenaries play a bigger role and even allow for job classes that are not even mandatory to ever use in the whole campaign.
Despite the huge number of troops on screen, the game runs almost always smoothly. Spell effects look brilliant, and the game does a good job to make one really see and feel the masses, especially in melee. The impression is only disturbed by a short sight range, not only in the foggy scenarios. The metal soundtrack sounds great, but over time puts a bit too much pressure on one's nerves.
The story about several factions that try to get hold of the holy ground is surprisingly life-like, so much that there's a word constantly muted out in the speech. It says "patriarchal" in the subtitles, but one can imagine that the original word was probably more specific. The story is quite interesting with puzzle pieces spread out over all four campaigns to form a whole. If only it wasn't told so clumsily. The writing is bad enough and betrays its origin in translation all too often, but it's brought down even further by the voiceacting, which is passable at best and horrible at worst. Of all things, the actor for Gerald, the hero in the first campaign, delivers a performance so hilariously bad it almost turns the whole game into a comedy.
Despite the awkward storytelling, Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders is one of the better and most unique entries in the original Xbox' catalog. It was the first big console hit coming from Korea, and in his home country was awarded the grand prize at the Korean Game of the Year Awards 2004, the first and so far only console title that ever had the honor, and the only non-MMO game since 2001.
A Zerg?
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