Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders. A Diamond in the Rough.

I grew up playing Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders as a kid, and I was absolutely terrible at it. The progression of me trying to play The Crusaders was thus: Up until I was 17 I couldn't even complete the first campaign--the easy campaign--and I could only get through the first couple missions of the normal campaign. If you haven't played the game, there are four campaigns: easy, normal, and two hard. In that same order they are Gerald, Lucretia, Kendal, and Regnier (most people seem to agree that Kendal’s campaign is slightly easier than Regnier’s). From the start, both Gerald and Lucretia are available to play, but Kendal and Regnier are locked until you beat Lucretia’s campaign. So up until recently I had never played either of the hard difficulties. Back to it. Sometime when I was 18 I think I played the game again and was able to beat Gerald’s campaign but I couldn’t win the final mission of Lucretia’s. Still the other two characters eluded me. Finally, I played the game again (I am now almost 22) and I finally beat the entire game! When I completed that final mission as Lucretia I walked into my room and said to my roommate “I. Am. A god!”

So now onto what I think of the game. Obviously I liked it enough to keep picking it back up. In fact, before I played it this last time, I slowly stopped playing other games because I wanted to play Crusaders so bad. The game mechanics, in my mind, are phenomenal. It’s so cool that you are actually controlling an army. Now, you control armies in lots of different RTS games, but to me, Crusaders has a different feel. It just feels right that the units are in actual troops. You have a troop of infantry, cavalry, and archers that you both control and order, as opposed to several individual units. Counters for enemy units are straightforward and simple, not so many that you have to freak out. If there’s something doing splash damage like mortars, catapults, ballista, spread your troops out to avoid getting blasted. Archers shooting at you? Close up and block the arrows (although I found it easier to also spread out and try to rush there instead). When you’re in combat with your infantry troop you will control your main character, (whoever’s campaign it is) and the combat is a hack and slash style with melee combos that felt good. I didn’t just button mash, but used certain tactics against different enemies. Gameplay just felt right and made sense.

There were a couple things that stood out to me between the first two campaigns and the hard campaigns. First was that the scale of the battles goes up dramatically. Kendal’s campaign starts instantly with a massive battle bigger than anything you’ve seen previously and each mission tends to stay that way. The huge fights stay fast paced and I found that I was maneuvering troops significantly more than I had before. The second was that in the hard campaigns you pick all of the troops you bring into each mission. In the first two campaigns the game would hold your hand and lock in certain troops that you needed for most missions (even if you didn’t want them because you had something better). In the hard campaigns you could really tailor the experience and try different things if you wanted. Inevitably, I tended to stay with a combination of archers and heavy cavalry (and if I had more space I often brought more archers because I could have them be dedicated healers). This made the game feel very fresh, new, and I felt that it was the way the game was meant to be played.

The character dynamics were great, how I would imagine things should be. Your main character has two aids who tend to be opposites in their personalities, and the dialogue and voice acting is very well done. The subtitles don’t always line up with what is actually said, but you can clearly hear the voice acting (which many games cannot claim). Something that I personally found funny, especially after I understood it more, was the cutting of the word “patriarch” every time it was said in the game. From what I understand, the game first had all dialogue recorded using the term “pope” instead of “patriarch,” but because they were worried about using “pope” they decided to change it. However, with the audio already recorded, they simply changed the subtitles and bleeped out "pope" every time someone said it. Until then I had decided in my mind that somehow the word “patriarch” was so holy no one could actually say it, including the patriarch himself. It gives me a good chuckle every time I hear the brief silence where “pope” was cut out of the audio.

The last thing I’ll mention is the music. Though some people seem to hate it, I love it. One article I saw criticized the music because it didn't fit with that “period.” Firstly, in a fantasy universe there is no “period.” Maybe heavy metal was the period at the time. Simply put, the fighting is fast paced, intense, over the top, and epic, and the music was also fast paced, intense, over the top, and made me feel epic. I think it fits perfectly.

All in all I would recommend The Crusaders to anyone who thinks they can handle it. It’s challenging and therefore fulfilling. It’s an absolute blast and I had a very hard time putting it down. Each time I sat down I would plow through and entire campaign if I could. My biggest regret is that Heroes, the next Kingdom Under Fire game isn’t compatible with the Xbox 360. Otherwise, if you’ve got $10 to spare, I’d recommend this game.