King Arthur: Fallen Champions Reviews

It’s been a while since we last checked for reviews for Paradox Interactive’s budget interquel of King Arthur: The Role-playing Wargame, King Arthur: Fallen Champions, so we have rounded up two new reviews, though unfortunately neither of them appears to be particularly convinced by the RPG/RTS hybrid.

The Adrenaline Vault, 3/5 with a “Play it” recommendation.

That being said, Fallen Champions comes with some odd problems. First off, there is no way to save during a battle. The battles generally last for at least an hour, so the inability to save during combat is inconvenient and really pointless in this day and age. I also found that the camera was problematic in some cases. The controls to move the camera around are easy to master, but on some maps, particularly those with very tall hills, navigating the map with the camera was needlessly difficult because of limits on how far you can zoom out. I found myself wrestling with the camera, trying to move around hills, while not being able to zoom out and see the whole battlefield. This will frustrate players until they get used to the limits of its movement. I also found myself both intrigued and saddened by the role-playing adventure portions of the game. The choose-your-own-adventure aspect to gameplay was very interesting; I found it refreshing that a designer didn’t feel the need to put in lots of voice-acting and cut-scenes. But in some ways, the adventure portions fall short of the mark. It is too easy in some of them to wander around endlessly, giving your character directional commands without actually accomplishing anything. I feel these parts could have either been much more focused, given the title’s emphasis on warfare, or made much more interactive with more story elements. After all, the King Arthur series has always advertised itself as a role-playing wargame.

King Arthur: Fallen Champions was fun to play. Priced at $10 dollars, it has enough content to justify its claims to being a stand-alone expansion and has around 10-12 hours of gameplay. While it’s not perfect, anyone who enjoyed the original King Arthur should enjoy this small offering until the sequel is released.

GamerGaia, 5.5/10.

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.

(…)

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.