King Arthur The Role Playing Wargame
King Arthur is a strategy role playing game featuring the most popular English mythical figure Arthur Pendragon and his famous sword swinging adventures including The Lady of the Lake and much more.
Ratings:
Graphics & Audio: 22/25,
Gameplay: 21/25,
Creativity 18/25,
Fun 23/25
Total: 84/100
King Arthur The Role Playing Wargame is more of a strategy battle game than a role playing game but you do have the leveling up of not only the Knights of the Round Table but all your troops. King Arthur plays out in two maps or realms of adventure, the England view and individual battlefields with both very well rendered.
The England view shows several provinces at one time and allows you to see an overview of the area you own and nearby lands with each section clearly marked with border colors. Your lands will have Blue boundaries and other lords will have various colors to show the territories each lord owns.
When playing in this view you can click on a city, point of interest or army to get some information about them but things like army makeup will not be shown. Each city or point of interest will show who is in charge of the province or other useful information.
Quests for your campaign are easily visible with a scroll marker and your quest journal and other important information come up on the side of your screen. Other information about current units or cities are on the lower part of the screen and each turn you are in will show army movements and any other things going on at that turn.
At the start of your turn you can move armies, obtain or continue quests or get information about cities, points of interest and armies. When an army is in a town that is under your control you can disband the troops, have them further rest and recruit new troops.
Quests are handled in a question and answer session with your decisions determining the course of the game and your morality from your decisions. The game plays according to morality and choices between battles in quests and your choices will decide the direction of the game.
Other lord’s attitude and choices toward you will be determined by the choices you make and mostly using how you answer questions determines the behavior of the other lords toward you. If your decisions lean toward good with letting captured knights go or releasing them when a ransom is offered as well as how the quest questions are answered makes other lords behave more friendly toward you if your answers are of a friendly nature.
Often times you can talk your way out of quests instead of battling and forging through a quest by the might of your sword and this often leads others to do the same toward you. Each turn your armies have a limited movement amount so you can only move them so far before they have to camp for the turn with each turn being a season.
The seasons are the regular year with winter being your camp turn to not only wait out the cold and snow but to train and recoup. Entering a controlled city allows you to recruit new troops as well as fortify existing army units so from time to time you have to go to your provinces.
Each knight will be in charge of an army but you can have armies without a knight but they will not fight well as they have no commander or leading figure. The army is composed of units like archers, footmen, heavy footmen and cavalry with up to 48 men for each unit. Any knight will have a unit attached to them as their men in arms so this takes up two of the available 16 spots available for any army.
Each unit will start out at level one and will rank up through either training in camps at winter or through combat with combat being the faster way. In combat each unit has its advantages and disadvantages as you would expect such as an advantage to having an archer heavy army.
Battles are fought through armies coming into contact and a few times during quests but happen either on your chosen battlefield or on one that you have no choice of. When you are able to choose you get a pick of three or four land types with features particular to that area such as grasslands with smaller hills, cliffs with thick forest spots or varied areas.
When you fight you are given an area marked in blue where you can move your units around before the battle begins and once placed you start. Battles are handled by morale or defeating enough units to bring morale down to zero measured on a bar at the top of your screen.
When you start the game shows you value locations like small castles, well positioned hills or magical areas that you can capture to lower the opposing army morale. Battle and fighting also lowers morale and if units are defeated your overall morale will continue to lower but holding a majority of value points will lower your morale slower or not at all.
Once you start much of the time the game will have their army race to capture these value points and then according to the games design will either attack you or attempt some other strategy. Many of the times when I had a good army I could easily defeat enough of the opposing forces using mostly archers but a few times I did not have enough archers or was outgunned in the arrow department.
Cavalry or horse soldiers are another good type of unit as well as Knights as a Knight can have magical weapons and spells they can use against other units and armies. Battles are determined by morale and if you can defeat enough of the opponents units quickly or take more of the value positions you can defeat them but even from behind with a lower army you can win by cunning and strategy.
I found defeating others was more a strategy than just numbers of better units using the terrain as well as simple medieval tactics like using cavalry as fast moving flanking units. Tactics and strategy aside the game does a great job of putting up a fight and adding enough difficulty that the game could be quite fun more than one or two runs through the campaign.
The graphics and audio are also well done with well detailed scenery and graphics and great audio when you get close in to the action. The graphics and effects look great and each soldier is well textured and moves like a real medieval character would.
The audio leaves a bit to be desired with a lesser amount of narration but the audio has decent background music and the battles have appropriate sounds and effects while playing. The game overall in the graphics and audio is pretty good and I could not really ask for much more for a technically well done game.
The games engine does a great job of giving some difficulty to the battles and the game play during the campaign and works very well. The game is heavy on the battles and does not have you bother with much more than following the quests with no land management or dealing with things other than battles in both the single player and multiplayer gaming.
We are not limited to a single player campaign as King Arthur also has a multiplayer online or LAN gaming as well as a battlefield scenario fighting against the computer. The multiplayer is a battle against a human player where you either jump into someone else’s hosted game or create your own.
If you host the game you choose the gold you have to purchase your army, the area to fight on and a few other choices and then wait for another player to join. The multiplayer may be a hit and miss deal as you may not find many playing online but there are a few times I have found a couple of people looking for a fight.
The multiplayer works just as well as the single player battles against the computer where you choose the gold you can get, from 10,000 to 100,000 pieces and more. Once you choose the gold you can choose the battle location and your army as well as the army you’re fighting against.
You can choose the random army choice by hitting the random button and the computer will pick units for you or you can choose an army. Simple foot soldiers are the cheapest choice at 1240 while the most expensive is your leaders with Hero Lancelot costing 10,000 gold pieces.
You can choose how much gold you have available from 10,000 to 100,000 and once you choose your army and the army you are going against as well as location you jump into the battle itself. After army placement you start the battle and fight it out against your enemy in a single fight using the usual King Arthur battle scenario.
Morale is again the key to winning but you can either capture key points across the map or just defeat enough soldiers of your opponent to bring the opposing armies morale down. Another key to winning and a way to get morale to lower quickly on the opposing army is to defeat or capture the opposing army’s leader.
King Arthur in the multiplayer and battle scenario works well and adds a lot to the value of the game with getting rid of the story campaign mode and allowing players to jump into battles without having to fuss with a story. The battles work well and are one of the main reasons to play the game as this is where the game is really fun and worthwhile.
King Arthur’s battles are really fun and give a real feel to battling in the days of old using swords and a limited amount of sorcery to defeat opponents that may be a bit to very over matched. King Arthur The Role Paying wargame is well worth purchasing and is a great buy for a strategy game with a bit of role playing thrown in.
I highly recommend King Arthur The Role Playing Wargame for a really fun strategy game with a simple campaign story line that highlights the battles of medieval England.