Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders First Look

At a pretty fast pace Phantagram Interactive had begun to announce some impressive titles and has already displayed some of them at the E3 show-floor. The PC/Xbox action games Strident and Duality are definitely leading the way. The recently revealed sequel to the popular real-time strategy Kingdom Under Fire, also has the potential to become one of the most popular titles in 2003.

Troops must get their morning jog before battle.

Burning the barbarian horde.

Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders takes place in the period after the so-called Second War of Heroes. When this war ended, all countries lived in temporary peace and harmony. Unfortunately, the Ancient Heart, which is regarded as the root of disaster, was laying in wait for a perfect moment to strike back. Following 50 years of peace and serenity a new war suddenly broke out. The reformed Dark Legion have advanced on the human town Hironeiden - which is located on the very border of Hexter. This border is positioned right between Elf and Orc territory, which evidently doesn't make the situation any better. Swiftly the united armies of Hironeiden and Eclessia charged to protect the sacred place located on these borders. Players will find themselves in the very middle of this new conflict.

Next to this catchy storyline (which I must admit reminds me a bit of Silmarilion and Lord of the Rings, but then again what doesn't?), players are going to get the opportunity to select from an outstanding range of fantasy characters - 200 of them to be accurate. Such an impressive number of units is obviously going to be demanding both in terms of graphics and AI handling. Since they all act in real time, each one of these characters will have an advanced AI performance that goes to work when you're focused on other matters during the game. In the midst of a full scale battle or a skirmish, both enemy and friendly troops respond intelligently to orders, simultaneously developing their own sense of strategy. So, clever tactics will be one of the most important gameplay ingredients in this game.

A crucial element in the game is the inclusion of customizable and upgradeable troops and generals who all have unique characteristics and skills. Armor and weaponry can also be upgraded, boosting the overall performance of both heroes and troops. Alongside weapons and armor, many other factors influence your success on the battlefield. For example, realistic in-game physics feature resistance of soil, gusts of wind, sunlight, that all have significant effect on the way your units act in battle. Of course, you can also expect various weather conditions to boot.

Since the game was announced the development team has pretty much been "hush-hush" on the whole project. However, thanks to our attendance at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo we were able to squeeze some exclusive info out of the dudes at Phantagram regarding the physics in the game. According to their PR Gavin Matheson, Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders is to have complete real-time battle, weather system, day & night cycles, and full interactive and undulated environment.

Contrary to the original game, Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders will feature full-3D graphics. It is also important to mention that all fantasy characters feature 3000 polygons per model. What's even more impressive is that heroes are enriched with an outstanding 10000 polygons. In short, the graphics were tuned to exploit the maximum out of the Xbox hardware. This denotes that the PC version will require a stronger system in order to achieve all of the aforementioned visual features.

While we are expecting to receive more info on this title, we also hope that Phantagram's game Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders will encourage other developers to bring more RTS games to the Xbox. At the same time, we are confident that PC owners and fans of the previous game will be thrilled to try this one out. And from what we've seen of the game thus far, you can be sure that it will represent a decent competition to the approaching RTS hits like Warcraft 3.