Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes

The first Kingdom Under Fire game was a surprise hit on the Xbox. As with any hit there has to be a sequel and Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes is the sequel. The biggest change to the game will be the inclusion of the Xbox Live support. Up to six players will be able to compete online via Xbox Live.

In case you didn’t know Kingdom Under Fire is a military/strategy action game that is a mix of Dynasty Warriors and strategy games. Just as in Dynasty Warriors the big draw is the amount of characters that appear on the screen at one time during a battle. The game will allow up to 3000 soldiers to be on a battle field at one time. It was an amazing scene to watch and to play since you can see soldiers as far as you can see fighting on the battle field.

Even with the amount of soldiers on the screen at one time the game still looks stunning. The main characters will be made up of 5000 polygons while large units will have 10,000 polygons. The characters looked fantastic and since the game revolves around the large epic battles there really isn’t much detail to the backgrounds. You will see castles and other natural environments but most of the look goes to the characters.

The game was a breeze to control. The attacks are performed with the press of a button. I didn’t get a chance to try and see if there was additional combos to pull off but it wasn’t a big deal. With the amount of characters on the screen at one time it was just fun running around and fighting the enemy. At any time during a battle you can bring up the menu option to order your troops to a different location on the map. If you want to retreat you can run away from the battle as well, but when is that fun? It might take a few minutes to get used to the controls when issuing commands but it shouldn’t be a problem for most gamers.

The game will include 50 campaign missions, along with Random and Custom missions. The play time is estimated from 30 to 50 hours for single player and of course unlimited for online. Another nice benefit of this game is the fact that Microsoft is publishing this game themselves in North America and Asia. With the extra muscle of Microsoft hopefully more gamers will get a chance to play this game.

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