One by one, your men get slaughtered. You hope backup arrives but arrives to get slaughtered by the dozens upon dozens of orcs in your vicinity. You fight your hardest, but it seems like blood and death are imprinted into your future. Developed and published by Reverie World Studios, INC, released March 27, 2015, this real-time strategy game is still in early access, and will test your skill, quick actions, and brains to beat your opponent. Whether you’re Orcs, Elves, or Humans, one thing is for certain: there will only be one to conquer them all.
I will now be referring to Kingdom Wars 2: Battles as KW2B. As soon as you are greeted by the welcome screen there is plenty to take in and navigate. First to mention is the single player where you can play by yourself with the settings you chose to pick. Next the campaign where you get a taste of a bloody story and guided gameplay mechanics. Techs and cards to help you in the game. Friends and guilds to play amongst your good friends and your clan. Lastly, a ranking system to see how you stack against the best of them.
Single player
The single player is first on our list and it’s practically the meat of the bunch. For the single player option, there is a lot of things you can do to customize your experience. You can pick how many players you want to go up against, to have many enemies to conquer over. You can opt to put a limit on resources at your disposal. You can either have it low so not as many resources come in or you can put it high and have plenty of resources at your disposal. You can put a feature called “zombies” that make it so that you can have fallen enemies or comrades resurrect and attack any nearby friend or foe and potentially could kill all of your men if you are not quick in dispatching them. You can set this to low or high to make it so that zombies can resurrect in a high or low amount (say high can resurrect ten out of twenty and low can resurrect five out of twenty). The creeps’ option makes it so that mini enemy encampments are placed around the map to deter your path to the enemy’s campsite. Now that you attempted a little single player you might be looking for a little campaign fun.
Campaign
Unlike the single player, campaign puts in a story to make the gameplay feel meaningful when you are conquering your enemy. To give you a quick synopsis of the story, it’s basically Orcs vs Humans, in which humans must survive, defend, fight, and/or run away from the ever so ruthless Orcs. There is a bit more detail if you care so much about the story, so I will leave you to further delve into the story. Besides the story element, you also got the gameplay in which you are guided on each step of the way, to help you in your conquest of surviving the Orcs. If you haven’t played the first game in the series or don’t know real time strategy games in general, you are not going to want to miss this. Now I’m going to try my best to be short but detailed in explaining the game mechanics. So for this, I'm going to use one group out of the three.
Gameplay mechanics
I'm going to choose the orcs. You have two variations of orcs: you got the marauders and you got laborers. Laborers do almost all resource gathering, except for marauders that really only can hunt for food. So with all the resources you have been collecting you start building buildings, whether it be: huts to expand the population, war barracks for fighting orcs, siege barracks to build equipment to storm your enemy’s camp, and for the purpose of the orcs you can also build warg pens for meat or to ride into battle. Each faction has their own buildings to make them stand out against one another like for example, humans have farms, to raise pigs, cows, and sheep for resources and elves have an arcane sanctuary to train enchanters that are another type of fighter. Eventually, your marauders and/or laborers will need to upgrade if you want the most out of them. For example marauders and laborers can transform into “impallers” so that they have the threshold to fight against enemies that are more suited for hand to hand combat. If you need archers the marauder itself is already an archer all you got to do is either spawn more of them or upgrade, the choice is yours. That is basically it. The factions are different and have their own set of fight style, class variations, and living quarters, and much, much more.
Once you feel that you are ready with your faction and you got your siege equipment and comrades ready, you can begin the siege. You can either drag a box over a group of your brave soldiers or individually click a group to maneuver them to where you want them to go. Rams break down doors, ladders help your soldiers breach the inner walls, and your men destroy who stand in their way.
Techs and Cards
Techs are unlocked with items and items can either be gotten by completing a match, daily login bonuses or trading. Trading can be done in the main screen and while there you are free to trade with other people who are trading as well. Techs enable units, buildings, and research in battle. So make sure you know what you are picking before you waste your items. Cards are boosts and bonuses that can be used in battle, so make sure you pick some of these up to get an advantage in your battles. There are guilds to form so that you can represent your clan, with clans you can invite your friends that are available through the friends option. Lastly, there is a ranking system so you can dominate your online battles and show how you really siege the game.
Graphics
The graphics are definitely not the highlight of this game. The character models were kind of an eye sore. I couldn’t make out any real detail aside from the legs and arms. Buildings, huts, tree huts, just looked tacky; not that much detail whatsoever put into anything really, aside from the water and that just looked acceptable. The map designs were satisfactory at best. You could definitely distinguish the maps from one another, but none of them really jumped out at me and made me say “wow it’s really impressive”.
Audio
The audio doesn't really captivate you, it's just there to be there, it really didn’t do anything except to set the mood of the game. Voice acting is alright. The actors just sound like they are mindlessly reading from the script, and not really putting any emotion into it. The repeated dialogue didn't bother because they were just responding to where you assigned them to, but every time hearing “would you like a potato” after assigning the group to collect food, I really would like to find that one individual and just send him to the Orcs. The background music just like I said before, just kind of sets the mood for the game. Giving the game a calm yet heroic tune.
Gameplay/Bugs
The gameplay was complex, yet workable. Taking a step back there is a lot going on. From the men, you got to control, to the buildings, and the enemies you also got to keep your eye on. But if you really take the time to read, and understand the game, you will see that you can probably manage. There were a few bugs/glitches at times. Sometimes the game was a little unresponsive, but nothing that made me want to jump into a fire. Weird glitches that happen out of nowhere, for example, night and day poppins where out of nowhere it's night time and the sun randomly appears. Honestly nothing detrimental that broke that game, but made me confused as hell.
Story
The story is there to give you something extra to do if you are bored with single player or multiplayer. The story is basically “Orcs kill everything”. Not much to say, no depth (unless you want it to), no choices, just watch a few cut scenes and adopt the role of the given faction. On top of that, you don't even get to finish the full story because the other episodes are not unlocked. So there is really no point of trying out the campaign unless you are bored. But hey, you might like.
In conclusion…
I don't really have experience in RTS games. Trying out a game of this magnitude was a daunting task. After ten plus hours of playing this game I really wasn't drawn in as I had hoped. Even though I didn't get to try out the multiplayer due to the fact that I couldn't get a match going. The game wasn't that bad by any means and I'm sure if you loved the first game you are going to love this game as well. It's just not a game I would recommend to anyone looking for an RTS. Unless you're going to put the time and effort, don't expect to jump in and conquer like you thought you would.
Pros:
-
Large engagements
-
Helpful tutorials for beginners
-
Factions really are diverse
Cons:
-
Graphics
-
Campaign
