Mark's Comments: I've played through the
tutorials and four missions of Kingdom Under Fire (KUF), probably
putting about five or six hours total into it. If you haven't
followed this game at all, it's an RTS game with some dungeon
crawl levels tossed in. Developed by Phantagram in Korea and imported
by Gathering of Developers, it's safe to say that KUF really wants
to be both Warcraft II and Diablo. It's also safe to say that
it falls short on both accounts, at least with the bit I've experienced.
Orcs, Elves, and the usual suspects
KUF begins with a nice enough, though still ordinary,
animated cutscene. Guess what? A peaceful human village is slaughtered
by orcs! Can you imagine! The scene then shifts to a couple of
knights sitting at a table banging their mailed fists. Either
the orcs have them upset or Dominos is late with their pizza order.
Hard to tell, but you've now entered the trite world of KUF.
The first mission starts and you control Curian,
a brooding young hero just returned from adventuring in distant
lands only to see the orcs overrun his village. Although Curian
is dark of hair and mysterious looking, in the game he speaks
in a high-pitched voice, like a hero who's jockstrap is a few
sizes too small. It's a bit disconcerting.
KUF uses the game engine to create little in-mission
"cinematics". It's both attractive and also a bit annoying.
During an early mission this is used to introduce a big friendly
army of mounted knights who have arrived on the scene, and we
see them run, their leader speaks his piece, and then they charge
towards the ramparts of the castle the player controls, their
horses kicking up dust trails behind them. I found myself nodding
and saying, "Yeah, this is kind of neat." What's off-putting
is having the game engine suddenly seize control of your game
and waste your time as a messenger comes up and says something
like, "The orcs are on the way and boy are they mean!"
The camera will shift, you can't select anything, and the camera
movements are a bit jerky too. Starcraft did this too, but not
as often as KUF does it, and the transition was a bit more predictable
in that game. In KUF you're tooling along selecting this and that,
and then all of a sudden the game doesn't let you select anything.
It's just a bit clumsy.
The RTS gameplay
The gameplay itself is standard stuff. Mine three
resources — gold, ore, and mana. Create buildings and that
let you build troops and upgrade them with new abilities. It's
a farm-based game too, like Warcraft, so your population is limited
by the number of farms you have.
KUF uses a combined arms approach as well. Archers
need to be protected by infantry, and artillery units and mounted
knights provide long-range firepower and quick strike ability.
I only played one orc mission, so I'm really not as familar with
their troops, but KUV seems to used mirrored armies, like Warcraft.
Human Archers have their counterpart in Dark Elves, and so on.
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