Kingdom Under Fire: A War of Heroes

The battle between good and evil clash yet once again in Kingdom Under Fire, put out by Phantagram, a member of G.O.D. The story is set in the fantasy kingdom of bersiah, a realm torn by centuries of war. Your task is to choose between the forces of light or darkness and lead your armies to vanquish the enemy. Along the way you will meet heroes and villains alike in a compelling story of betrayal, corruption, and destruction.

According to the Phantagram website this game is a hybrid of RTS and RPG.... which sounds very good, but actually the game fails to really be anything more than a RTS.

Installation of the game went flawlessly as i settled in for what I had hoped to be an immersing story and quite possible a decent game. Upon loading, which seems to take forever though it was only about 3 minutes on my 500mhz machine, i was treated to a lackluster option menu. No problem I thought, ill just go into the option menu and do a little adjusting before i start. To my surprise, there were no resolution settings and only two game level settings. Those of you out there with top end video cards may be disappointed at the 640 x 480 graphics. Still it ran quite seamlessly on my Voodoo 3, and the normal mode of the game proved to be easy enough at the beginning of the game for a novice while increasing in difficulty as the game progresses, but it might prove to easy for hardcore RTS fans.

On to the game, the opening cinemas, and all the cinemas for that matter, were of very good quality, but did not really provide any real insight to what laid ahead of me. Each mission had a decent briefing with good voice acting, but the heroes in the missions here quite lame in my personal opinion. After about the tenth time hearing "Death to the orcs" my ears were ready to bleed. The missions all were in the three-quarter prospective, which is fitting for any RTS. I could not help but feel I had played the game before but it was called Total Annihilation: Kingdoms. The RPG part of the game was a real let down though as it didn't feel like a RPG but more like a hack and slash game. Level designs were so-so at best. Spells and special effects were good but it all had a canned feel to it.

All said though it is a good, even if mediocre, game. If you want a great RTS then get Starcraft or wait for Warcraft 3, if you want a great RPG the get Baldurs Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, but if you want a run of the mill RTS/RPG that doesn't quite live up to its ambitious hype then this is the perfect game for you.