In an age where everything is being rebooted or remastered, we find more and more properties getting a current day look, including games from back in 2004, games like Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders. It has a new lease on life with its PC release. This Action-RTS game is developed by Blueside, a company responsible for the original titles on Xbox and Xbox 360, and this is our review of it.
Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders, is a medieval-style game with RPG elements. You enter into the battlefield and have to use an onscreen cursor to move your units around from above. The cursor shows up as a green line through the map, and you can change the distance by moving your joystick in different directions. You will walk towards the enemy combatants and once you are close enough you are thrust into battle with your characters, and this is where the action picks up. This is a direction I hadn’t personally seen until this title. It impressed me that a game from 2004 took such a unique risk in how they developed it.
Characters can be upgraded at the barracks. There are several weapons, armor, and miscellaneous items to pick from. Your gear, when upgraded, increases resistance to elements, such as fire, and, in the case of your weapons, can add fire damage, or other types, to them as well. These effects will help you run through each level as you fight off the enemy forces. This is one of the easiest ways to end your battles as fast as possible.
With an ever-changing battlefield, take every advantage that you can get. Finding and killing the leader of each group is a challenge sometimes but it makes the game a little more fun for me in that way. Environmental effects can also shape the way your fight will turn out, with wind effects pushing your arrows out of their trajectory, or setting forests on fire to make your enemy leave their hiding spaces.
The most fun part about the game for me is the story. I have always loved medieval games and the stories that you can craft with them. Throwing in the RPG elements and the mixture with RTS makes it something that can make players of different genres happy. I would have loved if the graphics were updated, the game specifics say that the graphics are now high definition, but making graphics from 2004 look HD doesn’t necessarily work with all games. With updated models and improving the combat a little more, it would have made this a much better game. Fans of the series will probably be up for this remastered title but, for the price and story, it is worth the price listed.
Note: Our copy was reviewed on Steam with a code provided by PR.
