King Arthur (PC CD)

I'm not a fan of strategy games generally, I usually find them boring and don't have the patience for them. This game makes up for it with the RPG elements.
You start in control of one army, play through the tutorial, and then you're onto your first choice- ally with a tyrant king, or a rightful king. The Tyrant isn't necessarily evil in this world, they just rule with an iron fist.

Your choice is the first step on the morality meter, going from Old Faith (Sidhe) to Christianity, and Rightful to Tyrant. You get different spells, units, abilities and bonuses dependent on your faith. It also affects the outcome of missions- will you ally with one religion or oppose it?

There are several kinds of adventure (missions) that you can access- Battle (you know you're going to fight from the start), Trade (Trade either food, gold, artifacts or women), Diplomacy (Chance of fighting based on either how you answer/your faith/to which outcome you select) and then Adventure (The best kind, you choose a knight to go through a text adventure with, and how you choose determines who joins you, how many units you lose, what bonuses you get etc)

These adventures pop up from time to time, and have time limits on them in terms of seasons. It's easy to keep on top of them at first, but around level 20 when you've got various armies contesting you at the same time, rebellions cropping up in your towns and cities, religious wars and keeping your allies happy to contend with then you're hard pressed to do them all without giving too much ground away. (I do have the Downloaded content so get an extra 9 missions and 2 companions but that shouldn't make too much difference to the number for those without, you'll still be busy).

Units are the typical fare; light infantry, heavy infantry, spearmen, archers and cavalry, and the multiple options therein. You can have 12 knights total, and 3 in reserve in case they die or you choose to dismiss someone. You will require multiple armies.

As for the Knights themselves, there are different classes and all the same attributes to choose from; Leadership (Less upkeep cost for the army,) Reign (More income from each Knights province if they're a liege lord), Adventure (More exp from missions and more movement points on the map), Fight (5% more dmg and hp for the knight and his unit with each level) and Magic (all knights use mana, champions and warlords for melee, sage for powerful spells).

There are masses of artifacts in the game, some of it needs to be used to unlock the extra stats, some provide extra skills, some just attribute bonuses- plenty of choice to match your play style.
You can also choose a wife for each knight, which give different bonuses- either suited to battle or liege lords, and always with at least 1 negative point to balance it out. Just don't marry them off straight away, you can get upgrades to get a new maid sent your court every year.
When you capture your first city you choose which buildings to construct, for various bonuses, and also need to choose upgrades for your troops. Levelling up, upgrading and building can only be done in Winter (no one moves in winter).

There is also an expansion in the works already (this game has been out for a while on Steam).

As for those who prefer strategy, you have unit formations, forests/swamps/hills which can turn the tide for one unit against each other, hiding bonuses to attack, fog spells to confound archers, sunlight spells if your enemy is stronger at night, buffs, healing, freeze spells, slow spells, kill everything in sight spells and victory locations (holding these cause the enemy morale to drop quicker, handy if they're stronger than you).
You also have to prioritise enemies/events on the map

The only reason it gets 4 and not 5 stars is the game launcher has a habit of crashing for some people.

A fair short description of the game after my first week of ownership would be to define it as a well balanced combination between the total war (TW) combat system (ok TW is based on the lords of the realm tactical combat system to be more historically accurate...) with a mix of role playing game (RPG). For lots like my self just this concept alone was a long awaited one. To my great surprise, despite being created by a small but obviously talented hungarian team (NeoCore) without the budget other companies like creative assembly has, this production is without exageration a masterpiece and way beyond (in gameplay) anything the total war series had to offer so far.

The game as deduced from its name seats on the legend of medieval King Arthur linked to celtic tradition, mythical excalibur, the holy grail, the knights of the round table, and you get the picture. This nice trick allowed the developers to add to improved tactical battles a rich but familiar story to get attached to very quickly, allowing you from the very biginning to get deeply involved in the story line. The objective is clearly to unite the divided kingdom. Now, contrary to a plain translation to the total war series where you get nice and beautiful but repetitive battles to run and conquer until the end, with no real feeling of achievement because of the very low difficulty level of the repetitive battles and no real campaign management combined with non existent strategy at any level but only battle tactics, KA has this huge solid story behind raining into the game as quests and events (and I say raining because the developers really worked on the project and they filled the game with incredible amount of options) that not only keep you entertained but gives you a big variety of alternative important objectives to be followed giving you clear and sometimes also tough intermidiate goals to pursue on the way to achive your final goal.

The RPG part is really big. It includes the traditional artifacts to be found and distributed between your heroes (that will clearly influence your tactical decisions in battle) loads of heroes that will join you after finishing quests (within the traditional 3 classes of wizard = magic, champion = warrior and warlord = leadership) that will lead you armies in battle side by side with your troops TW style, meaning that although attached to a regiment you can zoom into the regiments and you will see your hero with own hit points and damage. They can make a difference in battle but will be taken down as everyone else so you need the army. You can obviously decide which regiment and type to attach each hero to. Heroes can be wounded (depending on the severity of the wound they might be out of play for several turns to engage into battle or run quests), but will never die if you win the battle. If you lose they can be captured (meaning they need randsom) or leave your cause and the game, which is like dying. As in every RPG they have several skills and magic spells depending on the hero class and alignment to chose from on level ups after experience gained in tactical combat or quests and also attributes that will be upgraded the same way. Artifacts will complement these skills and attributes. The units also get upgrades but contrary to TW you can chose what attribures to level up. The result is that you become very attached to the heroes careers and units. The level up alternatives are so many that this feature only secures replayability. Also depending on the decisions you make on the quests your alignment will move along two axis ranging from rightful to tyrant and from old faith (celtic pagan) to christian. Every hero has its own alignmnt values that can be slightly modified by buildings constructed in your strongholds and quests decisions but if they differ from yours (you are King arthur and the decision maker) significantly then they will leave your cause. This gives an added level of complexity for deciding on who you will invest in development and keep on your round table. Depending on the alignment level within this two axis you will unlock additional skills and spells for your heroes.

For the tactical combat part, units share the main familiar classes and combat style of medieval total war (heavy cavalry, light cavalry, archers, heavy infantry, light infantry and pikemen). Different from TW is the bigger variety offered here of each unit class, with also welcome individual innate skills that differentiate them from one another in combat and not just by skins. In KA each class has not only linked streghts and weaknesses against other units (like spearmen against cavalry) but also gives very high importance to terrain type and weather which is tactically essential. In this way light infantry can fight very well in forests for instance with very significant bonuses while heavy armoured infantry will almost be drawning while crossing swamps in the battle map severely affecting their movement and combat values making light infantry no match for the very best armoured unit in the particular terrain type (all this info and combat values are nicely described on the units interface and map itself which I found very thoughtful from the developers). On top of that each unit has a selection of tactical formations, depending on its type, to chose from in battle that will change your bonuses against other units and alter movement speed on the battle map. Each of your choices will have advantages and disadvantages making the tactical battles neat and challenging. Finally each battle map has a number of locations/ flags (from 2 to 7) to be conquered. Once those locations are captured Troops in their vecinity will have a skill or spell bonus giving you a combat advantage. Most importantly the side that has the less captured locations will have its morale bar constantly decreased eventually ending the battle when reaching 0 in favour of the oponent even if you still have superior forces. This is another excellent trick from the developers to avoid the constant tactical defensive stands against the AI. This tactics are specially true in TW where the best strategy is to wait in a solid position for the AI to attack you (or like in NTW to pound them with cannons from the very far distance even when in heavy rain... I guess Waterloo would have had a very different outcome if that would have hold true :) ). You really need to go on the offensive in this game (at least until you get 50% of the flags but probably by then you have already engaged in battle). Of course you can win without capturing any location on the battle map by eliminating the enemy troops, but again you will need to be fast as the timer on the morale bar is always ticking. The result is an excellent and challenging battle experince much better than any of the total war series (maybe with only a couple of overpowered spells like the combo enfeeblement + burning Magic).

Finally you do have economy management as well, as expected, with buildings, research, population growth, etc. Heroes will need to be assigned to govern your provinces carefully and wisely arranging proper marriages to get the right bonus attributes (every hero and lady has possitive and negative attributes you will need to balance correctly). Also to mention is the fact that when a knight is assigned as governor (they can govern max 3 regions) this does not prevent him to lead or be part of an army at the same time. Economy decisions are not trivial but extremely important as money and food to feed your armies and recruit are not flowing down the river as seem to be the case in other games like TW. It has been ages, probably since sid meiers civilisation, that I have not experineced a good challenging game (ok this review is based on hard level for now, very hard I did not yet unlock and I am looking forward for that one) and on top of that the whole quest system adds a good amount of flavour to the experience making it very entertaining and addictive. I experienced no bugs or CTDs by the way. Excellent job NeoCore.

maybe i am playing it a little late but rome total war would smash this but fun nevertheless.id say try it not really expensive, new one is coming out soon which is why i played this one.