King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame

Though the extreme difficulty curve gives us some pause, King Arthur is an easy title to recommend. All of the various elements come together nicely with a gorgeous and stylish presentation.

A supreme strategy game, rich with incident and detail. Finally some worthy competition for the Total War series. [Mar 2010, p.76]

King Arthur - The Roleplaying Wargame is a typical turn based strategy game with magic and role-playing elements.

Camelot instead of Washington, Excalibur instead of muskets and the Round Table instead of Founding Fathers. Lots of ideas taken straight from the Total War series and lots of good own ones, too. If you like to enable more and more things in a game instead of being shown everything at once, this is a game for you. It's not a game worthy for a King yet, but more than worthy for a Prince.

King Arthur is the kind of title big game companies just don't make anymore. Challenging, ambitious and quirky, this is certainly a game that deserves a look, particularly if Neocore continue the fine job they're doing with addressing a few of the game's issues.

There's allot I like about the game, it looks pleasing to the eye, sound and music is of a consistently high standard and there are some features that prevent the whole thing from feeling like a tired retread of other games before it. As a hybrid however it occasionally missteps and fails to fully succeed in blending two different types of genre's into one cohesive whole.

Sound in the game is superbly done, the music sound track fits the look and feel of the game. With sweeping grand music and drumming beats fit for the grand epic adventure that the game is. So too is the voice acting, with flair and conviction and an earnest truth ringing in the words.

The consistency in design and reverence for the subject matter is King Arthur's greatest strength. Too often war games of this persuasion end up as dry, hardcore affairs that only the slimmest of niche audiences can appreciate. Neocore, although biting off a little more than it can chew, has provided an experience that positively oozes with atmosphere and challenge, yet all the while catering to those that spend twelve hours a day devising battlefield plans - and the other twelve reading the Art of War.

King Arthur is a PC gamers, game. It expects you to not be a brain-dead gamer and gives you a game that will challenge you on that level.

King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame is one of those games that are close to be a main feature, but some problems and errors drop that ambition to the ground.

Pretty graphics, solid gameplay, a well-developed setting – Neocore Games hit a bull's-eye. Despite some rough edges and a tacked-on multiplayer, King Arthur is much more interesting than Neocore's previous effort and head-and-shoulders above Warhammer: Mark of Chaos.

Loses a few points in the strategy department, but makes up for them in atmosphere, one in which I'm sure Uther Pendragon himself would have felt quite at home. On my part, I would have loved a deeper economic system and a better unit balance during the battles, but on the other hand, I was pleased by the character complexity and the RPG elements.

King Arthur is a good alternative to Total War games: well structured, it includes some interesting ideas as heroes and their quests, or the dynamic seasons. Despite its non optimally balanced troops and the lack of multiplayer campaign, the quality of King Arthur and its low price will surely prove to be attractive.

A nice game that will appeal equally to role-playing and strategy fans.

The production values are high. [May 2010, p.92]

A nice blend of strategy and RPG, this King Arthur delivers good fun. It won't match the Total War absolute RTS perfectionism, neither the depth of real RPG, but it's still an original and entertaining title.

A well executed mix between a Total War series kind of strategy and a role playing game. A too heavy difficult level and some unbalanced units keep the game away from better scores.

Neocore has built an original and consistent game premise, which is attractive and successfully combines military strategy with a RPG-like development which allows different game experiences in each game.

I think it's a good sophomore title from the people at Neocore. Not everyone is going to be able to play it because it is so tough, but for those gamers who have the ability, they will be happy.

King Arthur tells a great story, and I found myself enjoying the text adventure part of the design more than I did the 3D battles and while the game doesn't quite reach the heights of the Total War series at its best (namely Rome and Medieval), it's clearly worth your time and offers enough new ideas to keep its Total War borrowing at arm's length and remain its own game.

Full of promise, but let down by unfortunate control and balance issues. [Mar 2010, p.73]