We bring you some updated impressions on King Arthur II

Describing the King Arthur: The Role Playing War Game series to somebody who has never seen it before is, it turns out, quite difficult. I’ve sat here for a while now considering how to level it with the readers of Strategy Informer who have never seen the first game, and I’ve come up with this – it’s kind of like Total War, but not, and with monsters, magic, fantasy and all the RPG trimmings that come with that.
 

I can see this is going to hurt...

The first game was a cult hit, but it was rough looking at best and a bit of a big with a beautiful brain underneath those underwhelming looks at worse – because of that, it’s exciting to see that in the second game they’ve built a whole new engine from the ground up.

It’s prettier and more detailed than the first game, allowing you to get in close on the battlefield and see the action – and in line with that the animations and general quality of the troops you’ll be fighting with and against has also been improved. It’s a huge jump, and it’s very interesting indeed to see the supernatural elements juxtaposed with what even now looks like a Total War title.

While we didn’t see all that much of it in our short E3 demo, we were told that another big improvement in the game comes in the Campaign map – it’s double the size of the one in the first game and now includes more variety in the type of areas you’ll see. There’s more options here, too, with expanded morality choices and more interesting ways to respond to quests rather than just doing as you’re told right away.



The hero characters are one area where this RTS has more in common with things like Warcraft, and they return in this game with an expansion to how they work. There’s now a second type of hero who is even more powerful still, and these characters come packed with their own unique abilities and bonuses in battle – though putting them in danger might not always be a wise decision.

In battle magic has been changed up some to make it a little more viable, too. In the previous game magic spells triggered would happen immediately – which meant players wouldn’t have time to react. That’s changed now. If you’re summoning a gigantic fireball from the heavens, the player will get something of a heads up on the map. If they’re paying enough attention, they might even be able to move some of their troops out of the path of the fiery ball of destruction.
 

I wouldn't want to meet them on a dark night

Some spells will even work in counter against each other, so you could cast something back of your own – the point is spells are no longer unblockable techniques that can change the flow of a battle in a matter of seconds. They can still change things, but they have to be cast in a tactically correct manner.

Also of a big effect to battle is the actual storyline. The story doesn’t retell the first game, instead continuing the lore on from there – a new antagonist, a witch, attempts to assassinate King Arthur. This has some sort of strange knock-on effect and the end result is that portals to the underworld open up and spew forth lots of satanic monsters into the land of Britannia.

The addition of monsters means that the team could start to branch out with new types of units. A big change is flying units – winged beasts – that perform differently and can’t be tackled all that well by normal ground troops. The humans have trained some new types of units as well to combat this, so you’ll be fighting in lots of new ways against new, beastly enemies.

Everything about King Arthur II looked like a bigger, better and more ambitious approach to the ideas laid down in the first game. For the sequel the team are more confident and able to experiment with areas and ideas like fantasy characters that they’d avoided diving too deeply into with the first title.
 

Despite still retaining the old school RTS-interface, you can zoom right into the nitty gritty action

If you’re looking for an RTS with a little sprinkling of RPG and a lot of influence from the many fantasy worlds out there, King Arthur II may just be the ticket. Best of all, now it actually looks pretty good. It’s out later this year for PC.