No save for you!
The first mission is extremely simple. Herd a few
villagers into the mountains and you've done it. That's why I
didn't notice the game's glaring deficiency until the second mission.
Remember the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld? It seems like
developers are turning into Save Nazis. My copy of Kingdom Under
Fire came without documentation, so I was sure that I had to be
missing an option to save my game in the middle of a mission.
I mean, who would design an RTS game that can have you build for
an hour in a mission, only to lose it because you get reckless
with a hero and let him die, and not allow you to save!?!
Phantagram, apparently. I finally checked GOD's forums and saw
a message confirming that you can only save after you complete
a mission.
That's right, there is no in-mission save. You can
only save after you successfully complete a mission. Believe you
me, this is more than enough reason to avoid this game. I played
the first long mission three times. The first because I made a
few mistakes. The second time because I had the mission more or
less won and foolishly allowed my soprano-singing hero Curian
to be killed. Finally, the third time was the charm. Still, I
wasted a couple of hours on the previous attempts. Games that
require building and patience to finish a level should allow you
to save as often as you want. It's a big black mark against KUF
that it doesn't.
The Romulus and Remus of RTS games: Pathfinding
and skirmish AI
I think there are two traits that RTS games should
be founded on. Pathfinding and skirmish AI. Give me those, and
you have a solid start. Unfortunately KUF never gets off to a
solid start.
Pathfinding is problematic. Most of the time it
works, but "most of the time" isn't good enough. Far
too often a path is blocked by other units, and rather than have
them move out of the way, the units just stop. KUF is tile-based
too, so it often looks like there's room to get by and there really
isn't.
That's not the end of it though. They can also get
stuck in shrubbery. It's ridiculous. My barbarian who has skewered
dozens of orcs with his badass Gillette vorpal blade gets hung
up in a bush. Cut the goddamn bush down! You're a barbarian! Sheesh!
If the pathfinding is irritating, the skirmish AI
is more disappointing than an Ed McMahon lookalike who appears
at your door to serve you with a subpoena instead of a multimillion
dollar check, but that's fodder for another story. I played three
skirmish games. In the first game I played for 45 minutes and
the AI never attacked, and then the game locked up. The second
time the AI did attack me early and beat me. Good for it. The
third time we had several battles and then the AI mysteriously
stopped in its tracks. It had a nice base, peons, and resources
to mine, but it just froze and let me build at my leisure and
destroy it. I waltzed in and slaughtered its peons and destroyed
its buildings, and that was that.
Of course, poor pathfinding and skirmish AI is not
all KUF offers. It also has Diablo-like levels.
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