King Arthur: Fallen Champions Reviews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on September 1st, 2011

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Real-time engagements are the meat of Fallen Champions. Battles feel like cut-down versions of engagements in the Total War series, although the quality here is high enough to resist criticizing this as any sort of poor man's version of those games. Tactical elements are strongly emphasized through the use of terrain features. Maps are loaded with hills, rivers, dense forests, ruined keeps, and many other amenities that can be used to aid in battles. The main drawback to the intricate terrain is the camera, which is clumsy to navigate and can't be scrolled back far enough to view the maps properly.

Missions also stress much more than just point A-point B exploration and mindless slaughters to the finish. Some involve stealth, like the Sidhe missions, where you need to sneak past enemy patrols and campfires, and the Pictish ones where your druid-like magical units can only move during the night. A wide range of units lets you mix things up and prevents you from just band selecting your entire army for mass charges. Most of the RTS standards are here, like cavalry, archers, pikemen, and so forth, along with some fantasy additions like giants and healing priests. The AI is astute as well, making scenarios very challenging on all but the easiest difficulty setting. Troops are always deployed smartly and aggressively. The only major flaw is predictability, as your enemies always come at you a little too aggressively with head-on charges. Heroes also gain skill points and acquire artifacts like magic weapons, rings, and armor that can be equipped before going into battle, providing further tactical options and a role-playing dimension.

One major miscue causes problems, however. Just like with King Arthur, there are no mid-mission save options. Once you start a scenario, you have to wrap it up in one sitting or come back to start from scratch. This wasn't a big deal in the prior game because it was balanced between running a kingdom and doing quick RTS missions. Here, though, the battles are the emphasis of the game and have often been padded out to the point where they can take well over an hour to finish. Some also come with nasty surprises after the midway point, while others deal with stealthy objectives where just one screwup gets you killed. The lack of any way to save progress on the fly is a real annoyance.

The trick with $10 downloadables is to temper your expectations. And KAFC has a few things going for it: I genuinely liked the adventure-time story bits, the graphics aren't atrocious, and the incessantly looping music tracks are pleasant, the first few times around. It's an interesting world, with interesting characters and ideas, but they've gone and made a shoddy mess of the strategy game part, resulting in an experience that simply isn't very much fun.

King Arthur: Fallen Champions needs what it simply won't get -- varied units, improved AI, and some more thought placed into tactics and the utility of formations. I can't speak to the rest of the series, but unless you're a diehard fan, feel free to skip this one.

To start with, the battlegrounds are huge. Now you might be thinking (what's wrong with that?) Well, note the use of the word battlegrounds rather than battles. Enemies on these gargantuan maps are scattered about like brain cells in a football team, resulting in hours of trudging around the map interspersed with a few minutes of battling here and there. And I really do mean hours, some of these missions can take two hours to complete, and that's with using the time acceleration buttons.

But long missions are fine, right, because if you get bored you can save and come back later? Fat chance. During battles you cannot save your progress, at all. Now in games like those of the Total War series this is fine, because if you lose you can regroup and fight another battle, a different battle. Losing is just another spice in the Tikka Masala of grand strategy, and can even help you in certain situations, like sending an army to stall an enemy while you recruit a much larger force. But because Fallen Champions is a linear sequence of extremely long missions, losing is like spilling Tikka Masala all over your cream coloured carpet after spending all afternoon making the damned thing.

What really doesn't help is that the opening missions are absolutely terrible. Of the three, Sir Lionel's is the least awful. It's a fairly straightforward quest to capture the Red Knight's keep, using your giant to destroy the castle's walls. Its biggest weaknesses are those I've already pointed out, plus a few immersion-breaking bugs such as the walls falling down before the giant hits them.

Unfortunately, as innovative and interesting as the battlefield tactics are in King Arthur: Fallen Champions, the game's lack of a mid-mission save or checkpoints can really bite you in the posterior. The tutorial does an adequate job of giving you the essentials of how to play (the basics are pretty easy), but it doesn't prepare you for all the tactical curve balls pitched at you in the actual missions.

And some missions (on Normal difficulty anyway) can easily consume 1-2 hours, and all it takes is one bad tactical flub to cripple or destroy your entire army and force you to restart the mission. Some might argue this is how it should be, but I think it ultimately makes the game difficult to play for those of us that can't easily commit 2-4 hours in a sitting. In addition, it leaves little room for experimentation and forces you to play very conservatively (which slows the pace of the game even further).

You can change the game's difficulty setting of course, but this is the wrong solution for the problem. The problem isn't the game's difficulty, the problem is that you can't easily step away from the battlefield and come back to finish later. On the other hand, one positive side effect of not having mid-mission saves is that crushing your enemies with brilliant battle plans is all the sweeter (nerd fist pump).

King Arthur: Fallen Champions is a bit on the short side for a strategy game, and the ending is kind of a let down. After such an epic battle, it is normal to expect a grandiose cut scene or at least a conclusion to the storyline. That wasn't the case, however; the last battle just ends with (You Are Victorious!) That is unacceptable. Nevertheless, I still recommend this game to anyone who enjoys RPGs and strategy games. It is definitely an enjoyable outing and the graphics are fantastic.

King Arthur: Fallen Champions isn't offensive, per se it simply fails in the whole (fun) department. The only reason I can really see for picking it up is if you just found ten bucks in your laundry, and happen to be absolutely dying for some watered down, uncreative, tactical RPGness. Although I'm sure there's plenty more value out there in the gaming world that ten bucks can get you, at least you'd only be out a ten spot.

King Arthur: Fallen Champions did grow on me. I've always felt that medieval strategy games are only for a very specific hardcore audience, and I still feel that's true. But the missions are varied, the units are diverse, and there's quite a bit of customization possible. Also, it's relatively short. All this comes together to form a game worth playing two or three times, if you can deal with a few interface problems. If you're a fan of the King Arthur series or you just can't quit playing strategy games, I would say Fallen Champions is worth checking out. For ten bucks, I can live with its shortcomings.

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