King Arthur II Demo Impressions

I am here to discuss the demo for the real time strategy rpg King Arthur II. If you recall the first game of the series, King Arthur, was met with many positive reviews for it's interesting take on the RTS formula. Gameplay wise it looks a lot of Total War game, graphically and how it controls, but the controls have never been that smooth. The first game came out in 2009 and the sequel is looking to hit the PC world tomorrow on January 27th for $40. They released a demo today all over the internet and you may find all that information on this forum post over at Paradox Interactive Forums. They have the demo available there from various places and it's about 2 gigabytes, but I'm not really sure why it's so big, seeing as how it is so short. It is pretty gorgeous though and maybe that's the reason why. The demo is very short so I don't have that many impressions, but onto the breach once more my friends.



So if you've ever played the first game then you know how these games work. You travel to places, you get quests, you manage cities, and you have heroes. Your heroes and units all gain experience and level up, leveling up heroes actually involves skill trees while units merely gain additional stat points that you can place into things like melee damage or morale. You can also find items through defeating enemy heroes, these can be equipped on your heroes like a typical RPG. The town management is fairly simple and seems to focus on individual unit types. For instance, the demo gives you control of three towns for a very short period of time and one town is focused on bowman, one on light infantry and one on spearmen. Each town had two or three buildigns available to build, but you can only pick one and each building would give specific bonuses to that unit, in your army, whenever your army was fighting a battle in that region. One thing I noticed immediately that is different from the first game is that you can now easily reinforce your units. There is one battle in the demo, which I will get back to later, and after the battle you end up with a ton of injured units. In King Arthur II you merely need to press a reinforce all button and all units, if you are in a friendly region, will need to rest for one turn before they are healed. This is a huge change from the first game when not only did it cost a ton of money to reinforce an injured unit but it took a long time.

The one battle you get to try in the demo is fairly typical, especially if you've played the first game. You still have a fairly large map with many different capture-able areas, all of which give your army different spells or bonuses. You still have various different types of units, like light infantry, bowmen, calvary, heavy infantry and spell casters. I am a bit surprised they didn't use this one demo battle to show off some of the new units in the game, particularly some of the huge impressive ones like dragons or giants. If you have played any medieval based RTS you will easily understand the concepts of the combat system, except for spells, they change it up a bit and make it so you can greatly hinder enemy units or help your own. Heroes are also very strong units that can do a lot of damage on their own but I wouldn't expect them to take on a hundred and twenty enemy swordsmen on their own. Before you enter the battle you start on the world map and it doesn't really give you free reign of anything, merely it guides you to your destination with fixed tutorial instructions. One of my favorite parts of the game has always been the way they handle quests. Once I reached the area where I was supposed to free someone the game entered a text based menu that showed me what was happening when my soldiers arrived in this area and how to proceed. My hero broke off from the main army and I was given the option to travel through the woods or along the road towards the castle. You get about five or six options like this, each of which have a different impact on how you manage to get through the quest. If you pick poor decisions you could enter the battle with a several injured hero unit or some other negative, but the way they handle the whole thing really reminds me of text-based rpgs that give you interesting, often difficult, options about how to go through the world.  Check out this video to get an idea of how it looks and plays. I used this uploader, AngryJoeShow, earlier for a video as well and while I don't like his commentary all that much he does capture some unique gameplay that is worth checking out.

Despite everything I've said I didn't really care for the demo that much. It didn't run very well, which they have addressed already and said it was early unstable build (many people haven't been able to run it well at all). It's not that the game was bad but the demo didn't show off much that was new or interesting and for a fairly large size, two gigabytes, it had very little content. Check out the demo at the links above or below and the game will be coming out everywhere tomorrow. Thanks for reading, be back tomorrow.
Main Website: http://www.kingarthurii.com/
Demo Info: http://www.kingarthurii.com/media/demos
Steam Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/24480

-Written by Sean Cargle