King Arthur II Review

Some interesting but poorly realized ideas make King Arthur II the poster child for wasted potential

Posted by Tim Reid on February 13, 2012 - 9:41pm EST

Many actions will impact whether you are a tyrant, a rightful leader, a proponent of the old faith or one of Christianity. Unlike in other games where you are given bonuses for going heavily onto one side or the other, King Arthur II encourages you to balance these things. If you go too far onto one side of morality or religion, there will actually be harmful affects applied to your army. As a result, the morality and religious meter feels poorly implemented and detracts from the quality of the role playing aspects. It is a shame that the game doesn't let you play as an outright diplomat throughout and avoid the troublesome battles, but unfortunately you have to defeat many armies, with even the auto-battle option being removed in some.

Further compounding the problems found in real time battles is sluggish and highly inconsistent performance. Using a powerful PC, the highest settings were totally unplayable, while even lowering the settings considerably resulted in the frame rate dipping into the low teens when zooming in on conflict. The game does boast technically impressive visuals, although it doesn't look any better than last year's Total War: Shogun 2, and that ran a whole lot better. The bad performance is associated with unresponsive control during the battles.

While sound effects in the game are decent enough, with battles sounding frantic and magic spells giving sharp cracks, the voice acting is wildly inconsistent. During battles, individual units remain silent while a quiet, monotone voice drones on in the background, saying things like "your unit is going to die; your soldiers are going to die; a spell was cast" which is most unhelpful because this verbal information is non-specific, and is better indicated visually on the screen anyhow. Fortunately, the sound track is great.

Even though King Arthur II has some interesting ideas and tries to do something unique by blending Role Playing elements with the Total War approach to strategy, in its current state the game is wildly inconsistent and very imbalanced. Battles generally provide no challenge and play out as chaotic melees, but are punctuated with a few brutally hard battles where the enemy army is composed of difficult to counter flying beasts. The role playing elements are interesting and add depth to the severely lacking strategically component, but overall King Arthur II feels like it could have been so much more with a bit more time and care put into optimization and balancing. Paradox has already released several patches, and with more this game could improve considerably, but in its current state, it is difficult to recommend.

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Our ratings for King Arthur II on PC out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)

Presentation

Technically impressive visuals and varied terrain with good music, although voice acting is limited and very inconsistent. Menus are highly functional and well designed.

Gameplay

Interactive-story book style adventure quests are fun, but the shallow strategy and imbalanced battles leave much to be desired.

Single Player

Some interesting role-playing elements and an intriguing story weakly prop up a buggy and imbalanced, albeit fairly lengthy, campaign with limited replay value.

Multiplayer

None

Performance

(Show PC Specs)

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo e7200 @ 3.1ghz
GPU: Powercolor Radeon HD 5850 PCS+
RAM: 4GB DDR2
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit

Even with a powerful rig frame rates are sluggish and inconsistent, errors pop up during the lengthy loading screens, while lowering the settings only improves things marginally.

Overall

An interesting but flawed attempt at blending RPG elements with Total-War style strategy gameplay, King Arthur II provides some fun adventures but leaves much to be desired.