Posts from — October 2005

A fun, lenghty game that seems at times impossible, yet easy all at the same time.

KOH is fun, don’t get me wrong, but the difficulty levels seem a bit flawed to me.

You start out picking from any number of different countries in a few different time periods – the country you choose dictates your starting position on the map. Pick poorly, and you’ll regret it the entire game.

You can pick a nation near the edge of the map and not have to worry about having 2 fronts to be attacked, or you can get in the middle of it all, and not have to worry about being cut off by a stronger neighbor. It all depends upon how you want to play.

From here, it is the typical strategy game, with the twist of being able to actually fight each battle your armies get into. If you LOVE that kind of RTS kind of interaction, KOH will seem a bit “lacking” here compared to games like TotalWAR: ROME.

The real game is about the map, troop placements and your royal court. The court is where you will spend a lot time mentoring your captains to influence your empire. You can simply hire a captain (in several different disciplines, like building, martial, spy, etc.) or you can train any adult males in your royal house. But, beware – if you use your King too much on assignment, he won’t be home makin’ babies with the queen, so you may have a schism in your house if your King dies with no adult heir.

On the map, you take of specific territories, each centered around a town. There are surrounding buildings of the town that can be ransaked for resources in an invasion situation. Doing this also draws troops out of the better defended towns, which may be a veritable fortress.

As your martial captains gain levels, you pick special talents for them. These talents make all the difference in the world for the game. A well trained captain will almost never loose against another captain of the same or lesser level – and there is the Achilles heel of the game.
By the time you get a well groomed army (and believe me, it DOES take some time), the game becomes a bit easy. You almost never jump down into the 3D fights anymore – a) because later in the game there are MANY of them going on and b) you’ll do a much worse job than your well trained captain would if left to his business.

There are many other aspects of the game that are fun factors to deal with – like religion (catholic, orthodox, muslim, pagan, etc), famous rebels, spies and civilization advantages that all make the overall task of taking over the world as multifaceted as it should be.

Gameplay Experience:

In one game, I played for about 30 hours building my empire until it was obvious I was going to win – unfortunately, that was when 1/3 of the map was STILL not my territory. But, I hadn’t lost a battle in 2 hours. The rest would be a PLODDING process. Not much fun there – so I started over on a different difficulty level.

And there in lies my complaint with this game – on more difficult levels, the beginning is WAAY too difficult. Oh, you can do it, but it really isn’t much fun. And, on the levels where the beginning is fun to play, the end is just too easy.

Overall though, I did get over 60 hours of enjoyment out of this game.

Bottom Line:

A fun game that can go on forever if you want it to. Great map strategy game that is a bit lite on the 3D RTS simulation for hardcore RTS fans. A bit screwy with difficulty levels.

If you liked DS 1, you’ll like DS2 ’cause its more Dungeon Siege-ier.

DS 2 is just like an update to DS 1, with a few improvements – pets, character powers, etc. Read the any other review, you’ll see what I mean.

I’ll just jump to a bottom line with my “review”:

If you like collecting loot, and finding that 1 piece of equipment that tricks out yer character, etc then you will love this game. There are so many pieces and unique sets, etc. that your head will spin about do you want this one or that one. Gold is basically useless in this game – except at the beginning for buying potions. But half way through the game, you’ll have more of it than you know what to do with – because the items in the shops are WEAK compared to what you find stuffed up some zombies rear.

Voice acting is horrible – what is up with Lothar the half-giant!???

Combat is fun, though your characters usually just kick-tush regardless of how many baddies are thrown at you. Usually 1 or 2 memebers of your team will be the ones to do most of the dieing – usually your mages. Whole swarms of mosters will single them out. Just make sure one of your tanks has a resurrect spell.

This game is fun and makes some marked improvements over the first or LOA. If you liked those, which I did, then you’ll like DS 2. It’s Dungeon Siege-ier!

Only thing I miss from the earlier games is “force cast”, when you could cast projectile spells wherever you wanted, allowing things like plasma balls to bounce around corners, etc. I miss that…

Short and sweet, this is a great game, with a few minor, but persistant flaws.

Time Played: ~45 hours
Platform: PC
Control: Keyboard + Mouse

Any Starfleet hound will tell you that this is probably the best Star Trek game that has been made to date.

The game as a whole is quite a lot of fun – in fact, I finished all 3 campaigns in 3 days, much to the chagrin of my sleeping habits.

Its a typical space SIM where you start out with a small ship and puny weapons and get brought through progressively harder missions, winning Prestige points that will buy you larger vessels and weapons with more punch. There are 3 campaigns – Klingon, Romulan and Federation, to be done in that order to follow a chronological story. The story line is quite good, and Patrick Stewart’s voice talent adds a lot of class to the Federation roles.

The game also has “conquest” mode, where you are basically just supposed to take over the galaxy – I haven’t played with that much, but it just seems to be more open ended action of the same ilk as the campaign. That is probably a good and bad thing – good because it allows you the freedom to fix and re-supply your ship when you want, and bad because it can potentially get monotonous.

You can also play as the Borg in conquest mode.

Now for a few flaws -

Combat can be quite fun, or really frustrating, depending upon the situation. Sometimes it feels like a Ballet of Hippos with these ships just endlessly circling each other, trying to get in the next shot. Other times there is so much going on, you really feel that it is pushing your limits of tactical awareness. So, flaw 1 is potentially monotonous combat situations where you just pick away at each other until one of you dies.

Flaw 2 – the map mode is horribly unintuitive and sometimes quite buggy.

Flaw 3 – actually flying the ship can really be a pain in the tush. Basically you click with the mouse on the 3D window indicating the direction that you would like to turn in. The ship then plots a set turn and executes until that point, with a clock style thermometer reading to let you know how much further you have to turn to meet you last command heading.

I haven’t found a way to tell it to just KEEP turning in that direction. There is a “Set Course to Orbit Target” mode, but that doesn’t work very well i my experience. I have to see if it can be done with a joystick, but I don’t think so. In fact, using the ships systems probably precludes that, because you do have to go back and forth a bit with the mouse to do things like beam assault teams, etc.

Conclusion:Anyway, despite a few flaws that bugged be me the whole time, this is an awesome game, and one that I’ll play for quite some time from now. Its an oldie that requires some looking on EBay, etc, but it is more than worth it.

If you like the Star Trek Universe and space SIMs in general, you’ll find this to be a lot of fun.

Closest Games for Comparison: Master of Orion II (3 sucked!), or Freelancer, sans the merchant aspect.