King Arthur: The Role-playing Wargame Reviews
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First up is PopMatters with a score of 8/10:
King Arthur is an impressive accomplishment on almost all fronts. It melds wonderful retro text quests and skill-based challenges with some great leveling and item-collecting mechanics, and it really oozes atmosphere from its sometimes soft rock pseudo Celtic score to its lush landscapes. However, every time that you try to immerse yourself in the game, it pulls you out by killing you or hamstringing your campaign for reasons you couldn't possibly have anticipated. Patches may help, but even then, the game needs a major overhaul from a readability and comprehensibility standpoint. It's fun, beautiful, and clever, but it's difficult to enjoy unless you really work at it. If you can stomach its shortcomings (and school yourself in its ways as quickly as possible), King Arthur is a unique and rewarding game.
Then we have Associated Content with a score of 84/100:
I highly recommend King Arthur The Role Playing Wargame for a really fun strategy game with a simple campaign story line that highlights the battles of medieval England.
Followed by GamePex with a score of 70%:
A Roleplaying Wargame it is, but only good enough to honor that title. Perhaps a future remaking of the game could bring more focus in making the story more immersive, or maybe even making the combat more natural and simple for the new player. The tutorial system also needs a boost, as it doesn't show you how to level your troops or to recruit troops, it kind of just leaves you to figure it out.
Before moving to Big Download for a score of "Wait":
King Arthur packs a ton of features into the game, but sabotages itself with its unbalanced difficulty and general lack of diplomatic options. Besides quests, there's no way to open up diplomatic channels with neighboring regions, no way to coordinate attacks with allies, and no way to improve unstable relations with gifts. In many ways, the game practically forces players to go to war with all the neighboring regions. It's hard to believe how a game that involves so many layers of strategy has such a shallow diplomacy system. Even though we enjoyed playing many aspects of the game, there's only so many times we can take having our armies decimated by overwhelming forces while being powerless to do anything about it. Perhaps future patches will address this issue further, but enjoyment is limited to players who enjoy enduring that kind of punishment.
And Tacticular Cancer for a scoreless critique:
In the end, this refreshingly innovative game demonstrates precisely the risk that being innovative in the games industry poses: Yes it is interesting, yes, it motivates to play it for a long time and no, it won't be a huge seller. And actually, it is doubly unfair because it is even relatively bug-free and has very nice graphics.
