King Arthur: Roleplaying Wargame
Much like you could guess by the game title, you do take the role of King Arthur in his quest for the throne of Britannia, right after Pendragons´s death. Along the way you will meet several potential Knight of the Round Table, sending them in battle or quest, while you rule Camelot. The game itself is a very Total War style game, with a turn based portion where you administrate your holdings and battles which are fought in real time.
The game have art design is impressive in every aspect, and help to invoke a lot Arthurian legend feeling to the game along with a high fantasy theme. Each of Knight of the Round Table have a unique design and the units and monsters are very detailed. However, the units lack the variation of animations that you would see in typical Total War game, which cause a strange thing - while impressive to see, the units aren´t interesting to see in action. This is made worst by a tendency unit have to "blob" on each other once engage in melee, making more difficult to see anything anyway.
The battles are very like in Total War, however the game does have a "Victory Point" system where if take a certain place on the battlefield, you not only gain more morale but some advantages, such as a church which heal troops that where close, but this kind forces and causes you to split your forces around the map to capture this points. The terrain of the battles are fixed, which in one hand mean that each one is unique, but also mean, that you might be see the same fields over and over again, and some of them have very strange geography, making very hard to see which is made worst by the camera controls which are very bad, while you can zoom in, is difficult to do anything except keeping the camera far away as possible.
While the game does feature a morale system, units almost never flee and you have to crush almost every army down to the last unit. Meaning also that there is less of the sensation of routing a enemy army.
The Knight of the Round Table act much like generals in a Total War game, but you can bring up of three of them in a single army, and each one does have it own skills and classes, while some are good fighters or leader, other are spell casters. They can engage in choose your adventure style of quests is one of the game best features, they are overall very well written, fun and does tied it well the the whole management of the round table you need to do, where you give magical items to your knight or marry them to some of the ladies you can find or rescue. They can die in battle and this lead to another problem, while they appear as unique figure in the unit they are attached, due the tendency to blob, you won´t almost be able to see them at all.
But while the quest system itself is interesting it is marked by a rather large two problems: First, you can trigger quests by just walking around which itself is annoying, but might mean you got a knight in a impossible situation. Second, while any quest which might end in a battle does give you a nice warning about (and the general size of enemy force), sometimes you can finish a quest which trigger a situation, which simple isn´t aware or ready to face it. One example is the quest to rescue Guinavere, at the end of it you do face a very difficult battle. But what the game does not warn you about is that afterward, the two neighbor kingdoms will declare war to you on the next turn. So here is what happen: you fight and mostly like to win the battle, which by the way is in the most strange battlefield ever, filled with huge mountains and covered in wood, that make the already bad camera controls even worst, but with huge causalities and too weak to recover, only to find yourself in impossible situation, with two huge stacks of that two kingdoms coming for you.
There is curious idea the game plays around - you can only recover losses on the field during the winter turns, but this kind causes you to stall, because the result are that after a battle you might be to weak to push forward, so you set up to rest, only to find in the next turn, when you recovered, that the enemy have another stack and this cycle repeat itself over and over again. By the way, this also mean, that if you suffer heavy loses you might just want to reload...
The game features a interesting morality chart where certain decisions and event tend you to push toward two paths: do you support the old religion or the christianism? and you will be fair ruler or a tyrannical one? This system works well and each decision carry some weight, because once you take a step in a certain direction, mean that while you gain access to something you will lose something too.
The administrative portion is rather simple, you can build building which unlock new units and do research to unlock stuff and that is pretty much all, there is some economy and diplomacy are very limited.
One major problem that affect the whole game is the rather strange way the game handle difficult and how part of it are very unbalanced - Things start rather easy and suddenly you can find yourself overwhelmed by events and battle much beyond your current power. Some units can be very overpowered, such as archers, but this isn´t clear for new players, meaning a lot of trail and error based on wild guess, while enemy units could get very powerful out of nowhere.
Is the game worth to check it out? yeah, I could see it so, but the difficult curve and vagueness of some of its parts might drive you away. However, the quest and administrate your Knights might make it worth.