14 DAY TRIAL // I am the first to confess that I never stood on an actual battlefield, clad in iron and holding a steel sword, in order to face a number of demonic, warped beasts and that the lack of this experience might very well make me unprepared to comment on how the battle terrain is built in King Arthur II – The Role-Playing Wargame.
Maybe the team working on Neocore Games tried to suggest how the perspective of men on the battlefield changed, how normal hills became huge mountains while beasts transformed and became more threatening in the mind of the individual who had to face them in battle.
But to mid armchair fantasy general mind, this terrain is ill-suited to the Britain of high fantasy and to any kind of tactical video games because it steals a lot from the actual battles, which represent at least half of what King Arthur II has to offer.
The mountains are very high, the valleys between them narrow and the landmarks important for the battles tend to be set in hard-to-reach areas of the battlefield.
The first result is that it’s hard to deploy an actual battle line most of the time and the resulting battles often feel like brawls more than tactics-driven contests of skill between generals.
I often renounce any thought of flanking or moving cavalry to the back of enemy forces and just focus on a pure head-on engagement because of the terrain. I often abandon any move towards the battlefield locations that would grant me spells and advantages.
The very fantasy-driven terrain (are there any mountains this high in real-like Great Britain?) also takes me out of the game world, makes me question the very premise of the game, and draws less enjoyment from the presentation, the story and the characters, all of which are very well put together by the developers at Neocore Games.