King Arthur: Fallen Champions

King Arthur: Fallen Champions drops players into the fantastical lands of old England, complete with all the King Arthur mythos – think knights in shining armor, high magic, wicked villains, demons and ghosts. Okay, maybe some of those aren't in the regular King Arthur legend, but they are certainly all present in this fantasy title.

At its heart, King Arthur: Fallen Champions is a RTS dipped in a heavy vat of lore. That said, don't expect to be playing as King Arthur or any of his usual associates in this game; the title focuses on three very different heroes with very different goals. The game is a stand-alone expansion to King Arthur: The Role Playing Game and a lead up to King Arthur II: The Role-Playing Wargame. Players can look forward to commanding small squads of units that contain everything from knights, archers, giants, ghosts… well, you get the idea. Taking their squads, players must order their often (and by often, I mean always) outnumbered units through large and lengthy maps while completing various objectives. It may be standard RTS material, but is King Arthur: Fallen Champions any good?

Fallen Champions - The Dirty Cops of The Hero World

Three distinct heroes with three different campaigns are available to players. Sir Lionel, the noble knight on a daring quest to save a damsel in distress – well, that's original; Lady Corrigan of the Sidhe, a dark creature who is searching for her way home – I got lost a lot in England when I was there too; finally, Drest the Chosen, a Pict shaman who is guided by mysterious visions and voices - which surprisingly was not code for crazy as hell in Arthurian times.

Little do they know how expendable they are.

Each Fallen Champion has unique abilities and spells. Throughout their individual campaigns the heroes will get more skill points to upgrade their abilities, letting players pick out what works best for each different hero. Alongside picking skills, heroes can equip a multitude of different items found throughout the campaign. This does give each hero a good bit of customizability and variety, so any player can match the hero to their own play styles.

The campaign revolves around these hero units, and they are by far the most useful and most powerful tools in your arsenal. Their bevy of powers turns the tides in the often lopsided battles that will come at you. Fallen Champions never presents a fair fight; you will be outnumbered, but the hero units are what offset that. If your particular hero dies, you will fail, so keeping them alive and well should be your primary objective since your actual prime objective will most likely be a mystery, but we'll get to that later.

We've Got Ourselves A Story

RTSes often have trouble with story elements – it is hard to show the unfolding drama amongst tiny, tiny character models. Some games handle story elements with cut scenes; King Arthur: Fallen Champions takes a different route where player choices actually have some effect. Before every mission the players must go through a 'pick your own adventure' type mode, where a short section of story is presented to the player via text, and the player must pick one of a few options on how they want their hero to react.

This element has both good and bad to it. Your character may find a group of soldiers willing to join your cause, in which case they will show up in the actual battle. Your hero may or may not discover a secret equipable artifact. The idea behind choosing your own path is indeed a very clever one and it is a good effort, but there are issues. The big issue is that half the options presented aren't exactly heroic. Do you want to run away like a coward or fight a giant? There is only one option for real heroes.

Pictured: Gameplay - Not Pictured: All Your Important Decisions

Another issue: in an age of high powered graphics, why should we choose our own adventure while not actually seeing or experiencing its beginning in a meaningful way? Yes, it is exciting to read about great adventures, but let's face it, we are playing a computer game, not reading a book. Frankly, it feels like the game is missing out on an awesome chance to add interesting gameplay while also communicating story elements; instead, the developers settled on simply giving players some readable text.

How Does It look?

King Arthur: Fallen Champions is a graphically pretty game, especially considering its price tag. While Crysis is in no danger of losing its spot on the graphics throne, Fallen Champions does have some very solid visuals. The fantasy art style is done well; character models look impressive, the environments are wonderfully done, spell effects look nice and overall it's a solid job in the graphical department.

A few graphical glitches may happen throughout the game, but this is nothing game-breaking. My PC experienced a few issues with graphical tearing, but nothing significant or long lasting; I'm also not convinced it wasn't an issue with my PC itself, but it was worth noting.

Soldiering On

Units operate in small squads, with the entire squad controlled as a whole instead of micromanaging each individual soldier. Each squad has stats in three basic categories: melee, defense and archery. As you might have guessed, units who are good at melee and defense probably aren't the best archers, and units who are good at archery aren't great at staying alive in a melee fight. Much like every RTS ever, each different unit type has its own strengths and weaknesses, and the key is to use strategy and tactics to keep your units alive by using their strengths and exposing the enemies’ weaknesses.

You...probably won't pass!

One thing King Arthur: Fallen Champions does well is unit diversity. There are more different unit squads than you can shake a stick at. Some units have special abilities, but many simply rely on their base stats and numbers in combat. This huge variety is a good thing, but it leads to a few negatives. With so many different units it's hard for any one unit to actually stand out; King Arthur: Fallen Champions doesn't have any memorable units and things start to boil down to base stats as the only determiner of success. Through my time with the game I constantly felt myself wondering, “How is this unit different than that one?” When so many things have super-similar statistics and attacks, variety is totally undermined.

Round 1: Fight

Battles in King Arthur: Fallen Champions feel a bit off, mostly because of the number of men that are controllable. You don't control individual men on the battlefield, so you lack the super-refined micromanaging abilities of many RTS games, but as we've seen with games like Company of Heroes and the Total War series, that's not always an issue. What King Arthur also lacks is a good micromanaging system for squads as a whole. Squads have basic control settings but moving them around feels clumsy, and with clumsy movement comes clumsy combat.

Once units are in combat it is really hard to tell what is actually going on; it isn't as easy as you would hope to figure out which side of a giant melee mob is winning. This can make knowing when to use special abilities a bit of a pain. Managing units as well as the combat system as a whole feels as if it could use some refinement and polishing.

The Big Picture

King Arthur: Fallen Champions lacks a few key features that can really be inconvenient for many gamers. Players are unable to save in the middle of a mission, and as many missions go on for well over an hour, this can be troublesome. The other issue is even more troublesome, and it's the fact that objectives aren't effectively labeled on the map. It is very difficult to tell what you need to do once inside of a mission, and there is no way in-game to actually determine your objective; this means if you don't have magnificent memorization skills you better write down your precise mission objective at the very start of a mission to have any clue what you need to do once you've been playing for an hour.

In addition to the lacking of key features, in-mission camera control is inconvenient at best. Trying to navigate the camera across the map never seems to work the way it should, which can be a major annoyance to players while in battle.

Final Verdict: Knights In Not-So-Shining-Armor

King Arthur: Fallen Champions isn't a bad game, though that isn't to say it is a great game either. Nothing in King Arthur really makes it stand out from the pack, but it's also a solid looking game with a lot of content; for the cheap price tag it has quite a bit of gameplay to it. Fallen Champions tries to implement a few cool storytelling and RPG aspects, but those elements all feel lacking, as if their potential hasn't been fully tapped.

Final Score: 5.5/10

Written by Ryan Moore

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