Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes

Metachronos overall score = 8.3 / 10

Positive
- Great mix of action and strategy
- Xbox Live support for up to six players
- New units and playable characters
- Six individual campaigns to choose from
- Deep unit customization system lets you create an army of your own

Negative
- Terrible translation gets in the way of the story
- Sloppy camera control

Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes borrows liberally from its predecessor when setting up the story for the latest game. Once again, racial tensions flare between the elves, vampires, orcs, and humans, resulting in widespread and violent conflicts throughout the land of Bersia. Since the Dark Legion was destroyed, humans quickly gained power. Eventually, the dark elves were united under the rule of the half-vampires, and together the newly formed Dark Legion set its sights on eliminating the humans and taking control of Bersia. The story in Heroes is the same kind of thing you'd find in any Tolkien-esque fantasy novel, with all kinds of fantastical beasts, magic, and heroes. Unfortunately, the story here isn't particularly interesting, because it unfolds through a series of poorly voiced and poorly written conversations accompanied by tiny, static character portraits. The story also suffers due to the awful translation in the game. The translation is so bad that talking with folks in the pub is completely useless and the information gathered is more of a joke than an addendum to the story. Even in the scrolling text that sets up the story as you wait for the game to load is full of nonsensical grammatical errors. For instance, you'll learn that one of the tribes in the game is "…engulped in war." And later you'll hear a man complain that he's "…already in war up to this neck." It's funny the first few times you see it, but it can be rather annoying when you're actually trying to make sense of the story.



Fortunately the story takes a backseat to the gameplay in Heroes. This game retains the same magic mix of real-time strategy and frenetic action of The Crusaders, but there are more characters and a few more units this time around. When you start a new game you can choose from seven different campaigns, although four of them are locked at the beginning of the game. You can choose from humans, dark elves, vampires, and orcs. Within each race you can also choose a leader, which functions as your main character throughout the campaign. Most races have one female and one male general, and if you played The Crusaders you'll recognize some of the characters immediately, like Gerald, Ellen, and Rupert. The campaigns each have unique storylines, but since all the events are taking place concurrently, the campaigns are all interlaced throughout the game. Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes isn't much different than The Crusaders. That's to be expected, though, since Heroes was released less than a year after the previous game. Basically Heroes keeps the same solid gameplay and adds just a little bit more in the form of new campaigns and improved online features. Although Heroes feels only slightly improved over the last game, its new features are more than enough reason to play.

this game looks like a copy of dynasty warriors with a polish some wax and a brand new sound system lol

great game

this is the 2nd KUD of the series. and its an RTS

exactly

KUD circle of doom is an action game

that's right