“There will be no aid, the decision is final.”

“Then I will help them myself, and parliament be damned!”

Now that is the attitude of a hero. And the threat he faces is large, and on the rampage. The orcs – squat bloodthirsty, cleaver-wielding warriors – have resurfaced in Bersiah, and it is up to a new age of heroes, led by the young Curian to repel the invaders.

Kingdom Under Fire: A War of Heroes, from Phantagram and the Gathering of Developers, is a game that combines real-time strategy and role playing (so some extent) with resource management and mission-based scenarios for a game that looks fairly good, but has some problems in storyline and vocal characterization.

Ok, the audio track of this whole game varies from the mundane, to the cliché, to just silly. Combine it with the subtitles for some real reasons to wince.

The game takes place in the land of Bersiah, at one time ruled by an evil lich. That was when the seven heroes of Xok made the scene, defeated the evil and allowed the land to reap the prosperous rewards of peace. In time, the legends passed into the realm of myth.

But now there is new trouble afoot, a new evil walking the land, and it once again a time for heroes.

Yep, same old story, though this time it begins with a young hero named Curian. He is bound for home when he comes across some orc scouts. After quickly dispatching them in a bloody hack fest, he finds his home under attack from an army of orcs, led by a huge ogre. The missions come fast and furious, as Curian tries to make sense of this fresh outbreak of violence while saving villagers from the blades of the orcs.

Why protect the peasants? Because they are basically helpless, and without them, you can’t recover the resources of the land – like gold – to build up your assets so you can build farms to feed the people, or barracks to train more warriors, or … You get the idea.

It seems that one-time hero, Rick Miner, was brought back from the land of the dead by his devastated compatriots, but with horrible consequences. They used an old dragon’s heart to resurrect Miner, who is now known as Rick Blood, the current incarnation of evil.

Kingdom Under Fire is a game that tries to do too much, and throws it all together into a mish-mash that seems drawn between several genres, without making up its mind what it wants to be.

Graphically, this game has some very nice rendered effects, solid landscape elements, magical spells that look quite cool, and realistic movement. And then there’s the brutal, blood-spurting battle scenes. The bloodletting in Diablo II was somewhat orderly compared to this game. The game is viewed from the clouds, with the fog of war shrouding the areas yet to be explored, or holding enemy units.

The audio has been discussed – so no need to revisit that.

Control-wise, this program is like most every other civ game, or multi-character RPG. Click on a unit, and move it, or have it engage in battle, or begin the resource-gathering process. This game does have a tutorial, but if you have ever indulged in either an RTS, or RPG, you can skip it and jump right into the game itself with little trouble.

Though the plot of this game is a rehash of many others, it does have a few nice features. You can play on the side of either the good guys, or the bad guys. The story is mission-based, and in order to advance, you must accomplish the next set of goals.

This game also allows for multiplayer games through a LAN or Internet. However, you don’t have much option as to the type of game you want to play in the multiplayer setting – they are all of the ‘destroy everyone else’ variety.

In spite of the rips delivered to this game in this review, it needs to be stated that Kingdom Under Fire: A War of Heroes is not a bad game. It just isn’t the type of game that adds to the genre, or brings anything new to the gaming world. It is merely an average game that may give players some distraction until the blockbuster games (like the soon-to-be-released Diablo 2 expansion pack) make their appearance.

This program is rated for Teens due to animated blood and animated violence.

Install: Medium
This is a two-disk install that eats up 900 megs of hard-drive space.

Gameplay: 7.5
This game is mission-based, and you must complete a mission to advance. There are no save points in mission. You must complete the scenario successfully in order to save and advance. Initially, the missions are rather simple, but they will get tougher as you move along. The program has a nice options package that will allow you to speed up the game controls, so the action moves a little faster. However, instead of cutscenes to move along within a scenario, the game pauses for conversations between characters on the game board. The game moves back and forth between the two, as though trying to emulate the conversation. It is annoying.

Graphics: 7.5
The terrain graphics are well done, and the combat scenes, though bloody, are solid. However, there are some elements that just don’t work well in this mix. For example: when your peasants have collected all the resources necessary to build a building – like a barracks, which produces warriors – when you click on that building and ask for a warrior, the windows in the building flicker on and off, much like a factory working in other games. It just seems odd and out-of-place.

Sound: 5
The musical score isn’t bad, but the vocal characterizations are not good. While the sounds of battle are standard, the blood-curdling screams of the fallen, or the last gasp of a key character going down, are not good.

Difficulty: 7
There are two difficulty levels – easy and normal. Keep your wits about you, use some common sense, and follow the mission mini-quests to a tee, and you will not have too much trouble with this game.

Concept: 6
Too many elements overwork this program. It has the elements of an RPG like Diablo II or Baldur’s Gate 2, and then throws in the resource management as a side note (albeit an important one) to confuse the game. The idea may have sounded good, but it didn’t translate too well.

Multiplayer: 7
This is just hack-and-slash mayhem.

Overall: 7
Kingdom Under Fire: A War of Heroes has some nice qualities and some bad ones. It is a game that does grow on the player, the more times it is launched. At first look, it seemed to be a tired plot revisited. However, the more times it was played, the easier it was to get into the game, and to even enjoy it. It is not the best game in this genre (go ahead and pick whichever one you like), and is likely to get washed away in the coming months by other products. It does take up a lot of hard-drive space. And that is definitely not a selling point for this product. But it does have solid graphics to spur it along.