Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes (Xbox)

Graphics

The game engine produces nice quality graphics, lush and full of life. The skies roll above in a pleasing manner and you get the trademark bloom that gives everything a nice ‘glow and shine’. It creates vast landscapes quickly and cleanly and the various mission areas are once again brought to life with a suitable level of detail, the most important factor being that there are no noticeable glitches or frame-rate judders, or at least there were not when I hammered at this game for ages.

There are hundreds of enemies on screen at one time; the limit of about one hundred from the first title has been well and truly exceeded as the game engine delivers close to double the original figure while displaying special effects, weather and so on.

So, on a graphical front, if you dig fantasy and mighty (Lord of the Rings) style battles then you’re going to love the look and feel of this one.

Mission and Area design

The mix of attack, defend and scouting missions from the first game is back and the whole thing offers 50+ missions in total in the Single Player story. For the first time: there are also Random Missions and Custom Missions where you can set up a quick battle and decide how you want it, with numerous features to experiment with.

The Area design of the game varies from mission to mission, some are in lush hills and dales while some take place is frozen landscapes under harsh conditions. As in the first game the weather and various elements like the sun, make for interesting tactical tools. The sun blinds enemy archers as long as it is behind you and so on.

There’s not much more I can say on this subject. The Area design is a make-or-break part of a game like this that tries to combine RTS with 3rd person battle sequences and thankfully they got it right this time around too.

Models

The models in KUF: Heroes are good ones, just like in the previous game. There seem to be a few more polygons in them this time around and they certainly have taken some time to add a little more detail to the individual seven heroes and their generals, leaving a little bit of detail out on the other units and troops since they’re only there to be slaughtered mindlessly in droves – huzzah!

The scanty-clad nature of the evil warrior female troops is back, especially with Morene’s costume. This seems to be par for the course now in most fantasy style games and a couple of female gamers at Games Xtreme commented that at least Ellen was dressed in full armour, that being a nice change.

All in all however the models in the game are up to and better than the previous and the brute-Orc warriors look even nastier with the new additions, spikes and dangerous looking armour/weapons.