14 DAY TRIAL // One of the main things I appreciate in strategy gaming is the freedom it offers, the way it makes it easy for gamers to explore a situation and decide what is the best approach to deal with it. Unfortunately, King Arthur II takes away some of this freedom and opts to hold the player’s hand and guide him through the experience.
King Arthur II also does not allow me to recruit armies based around a hero at any point during the game, and I need to wait for the hidden game master to allow me to have a larger force.
The game also eliminates castles and links province improvements to a number of discrete buildings.
There are no more harvests to worry about and all the money is doled out based on quest performance and the way a player gets through the battles.
There are many moments when just one objective is active and the player needs to simply decide how many seasons he is willing to wait for in order to recruit more units before tackling it.
King Arthur II tends to sometimes feel like a linear adventure dressed up in the clothes of the strategy game.
King Arthur II does a lot of things right, especially in the atmosphere and the text adventure departments, but the strategy gamer in me very much preferred the approach taken by the first game in the series, which gave the player more freedom and trusted him to be much more involved with his own trajectory through the game.
I hope that the development team at Neocore Games takes a look at the freedom which was present in sandbox mode for The Druids expansion for the first King Arthur and, down the line, delivers something similar for the sequel, giving players the space to play around with the cool mechanics and ideas that the game offers.