Xbox Review: Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes

Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes
Year: 2005
Platform: Xbox
Genre: Action-Strategy
Developed by: Blueside and Phantagram
Published by: Microsoft Game Studios

If you have never played either Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders or this game you are missing some rather unique gameplay. To some up the game's concept easily you could say they took a Dynasty Warriors style hack n'slash and mixed it with a sort of real-time strategy game. Although this game is a sort of prequel to the Crusaders it isn't quite as good. Graphics: The Xbox certainly wasn't a weak system for it's time and many would say it was the best of its generation as far as graphics go. This game plays into that idea with some rather fancy looking graphics. My brother saw me playing this game and made a comment that the "360 basically just added HD to the Xbox". Although the graphics aren't the greatest in this game and there is a great deal of art re-usage I would say this game looks good and most of the main characters are "interesting" to say the least. As with any strategy game the different unit types all look unique, but since this game is a battlefield where you can fight yourself; the units are of 20-30 soldiers and as such all the soldiers in a unit look the same. This is to be expected in games but still this sort of thing can often lead to you not being able to tell friend from foe, especially when you are fighting enemies that are the same race as you. This happens way too often and detracts both from the graphics and the gameplay. The environments in the game are varied to a degree, forest/green battlefields, desert battlefields, and snow battlefields. The environments aren't always the best looking and very often there isn't any sort of distinguishing features to the battlefields leading to the feeling of repition in the level design. Sound and Music The sound effects in the game do not really stand out as good or bad. They get the job done and everything in the game sounds as you would expect. There doesn't seem to be any lacking sound effects either. Its one of those things where if you don't notice it that means they did the job correctly. The game has voice overs for just about all the game's dialog with the exception of some unimportant text. The voice acting isn't the greatest ever but it gets the job done. I've never been picky about voice acting in games unless its horrible, because usually it isn't bad enough to make me wish there wasn't any. So in this case the voice acting is definitely a plus. The music in the game is a bunch of rather generic sounding hardcore thrash metal. There is some decent material in the game's music but there isn't nearly enough variety in the game's music and far far too often is the case where you are listening to the same not so good song over and over. It some missions there are noticeable transitions between softer music and harder music when you get in battle and it does add to the music's effect on the game. Although I don't particularly care for the game's music as a whole I should say that if I was still 15; I would probably say something like, "This game has awesome music!", so its definitely not the worst game music. Gameplay: Now as I mentioned this game is a prequel of sorts to Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders but the game no matter how I look at it seems like it was made just to pay the bills. This game feels like a sort of expansion pack, they added a couple unit types, made new missions, and added a bit to the backstory of the Crusaders. The Crusaders is a far superior game in everyway. Basically the story in this game is a backstory for the crusaders. All the seven campaigns in this either set up the Crusaders story or show part of the Crusaders from a different character's perspective. It makes me wonder if they didn't just reuse ideas that didn't fit into previous game to write the story for this. All the main heroes for this game also appeared as side-characters in the Crusaders. They did not really introduce many new characters and the ones they did just use generic officer models that were already in the game. The gameplay for the game is exactly as it is in the Crusaders, you control a number of units on a battlefield and order them around to complete the mission objectives. If your hero's unit gets into melee combat you can control your hero in a Dynasty Warriors style hack n' slash. You can also cast magic if your unit has the skill for it which adds additional variety to the gameplay. The strategies you can employ are highly varied as the number of different units have their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Too often though do you find that all your melee type units are completely ineffective and only your hero's unit can win in melee, even if your unit's level is higher than the enemy unit. As such it is often best to use ranged units. There are two sides each with two factions. The humans are made up of the Ecclesians and the Hironeidens, which both play exactly the same; and the other side (the Dark Legion) is made up of Dark Elves and Orcs. In this game when you are playing the elves based campaigns you get full access to the Dark Legions troops (both Elves and Orcs) just like the Crusaders; but the Orc campaign only lets you use the Orcs which makes things very difficult. Between each mission you can upgrade your units with experience points you gain and buy better equipment. You can hire new units and basically have free reign over what types of units you want to make. One huge complaint I have though is the fact that you can't really do what you want with your hero's unit. They are always melee and always with the same skills, only through the sub-officers can you give magic to your hero's unit. As stated above there are 7 campaigns that follow 7 different heroes. This is a lot of game as the Crusaders had 4 campaigns if I remember correctly. Although the campaigns are far shorter in this game they still seem to add up to being a longer game than the crusaders. Unfortunately the campaigns in this are far less interesting and have an insane amount of "filler" missions with the sole purpose of leveling your units. This makes each campaign only have about 5 actual story missions which leaves you doing boring find and destroy missions half the time. Your sub-officers in this game are also not unique whereas the all the main heroes of this game were sub-officers in the Crusaders. This was a big let-down as in the Crusaders calling in your sub-officer's special was neat and here you get a crappy generic attack from a generic looking officer. Some of the campaigns like the Cirith and the Urukubarr campaigns are just plain boring and not good. The story in the Cirith campaign is a joke (literally) and the Urukubarr campaign is just too hard. The Urukubarr campaign is also let down by the fact that you would think controlling a giant ogre would be badass, while they somehow made it not so much. The final thing I'll mention about the gameplay is that the game has bugs and often it seems like the computer is cheating. Far too often will you encounter a mission that bugs out and after 30 mins of play you find the mission is unwinnable. If this happened in one freakish mission it wouldn't be a big deal but there is always fear of having to redo a mission due to it bugging out. You have to follow the objectives carefully and just hope the game works right. The computer's units also seem to be much more powerful and damaging than yours. There is a great number of instances where an enemy siege type unit (bombards, and other explosive type units) will destroy your hero's unit in one or two volleys leading to sudden defeat. The game's difficulty level can get much higher than the Crusaders did and it always seems like if you had a similarly powered unit (or even twice as powerful) you couldn't do nearly as much damage as the enemies do. This feeling of unfairness highly cuts into the gameplay in the later campaigns. Final Word: This game feels like recycled material. The gameplay is fun for the most part and the missions can be extremely challenging, but far too often is there a set of generic and predictable set of objectives. You can find all the same gameplay in the Crusaders and get something that feels like a highly polished game. Here you get something that can be fun but just doesn't match up to its predecessor in anyway. The only reason why this game is good is because the strength of the gameplay of the Crusaders. It just feels like the game was half-complete or just plain old half-assed. But maybe in some world if you drank enough alcohol this game might be more entertaining. This game does have a bit of charm though despite its problems so I'll give it a bonus of 10%. The game also gets the Pantsu badge for the very "interesting" character styling and well... the just plain-old fantasy-game-style lack of much clothing on the Dark Elves. Although I should say I can't understand why they chose to give Ogres thongs.