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Kingdom Under Fire is one of a kind on the Xbox. When trying to describe it, the best I can do is Dynasty Warriors meets Rome: Total War. A lot of the game will have you smashing heads with a very Dynasty Warriors feel, but you’ll also be getting the chance to control fairly large sized armies around the battle field. The idea is solid, I must say, though the execution is sometimes flawed.

KUF is largely a single player outing, spanning four individual campaigns. Each campaign will give you control over one of four different characters. The first 2 characters are human, while the other 2 are members of the enemy Dark Legion. Each of the games campaigns give you a different spin on the story and the war taking place in the game. Altogether, the game boasts roughly 60 missions in the single player mode, along with some online play, which we’ll get to later.

Every mission in the games campaign will involve (at some point) finding an enemy army and laying waste to them. Through the game, you will be able to control numerous squads of men, but once combat is initiated, you will have control only over your hero character. Each of the selectable characters has their own moves and special abilities, as well as allies that will help you out in battle if needed. RPG elements will have you gaining experience every mission so that you can upgrade your hero and their officers. You’ll also earn gold during your missions, which you can use to purchase weapons and armor for your men.

As I’ve said, KUF is made up of both action and real-time strategy elements. The action elements are the ones that highlight KUF as a fun game, and really make up most of the gameplay as it stands. As most games of any fantasy setting these days, you’ll find the stereotypical orcs and elves, dragons and trolls, etc. These influences are obviously taken from Dungeons & Dragons, as they usually are. There’s often dozens upon dozens of characters on the screen during battles, with some battles clearing the 100 mark with ease.

While taking control of your character, you’ll find that combat is pretty shallow. You have 2 primary attacks: weak and strong, a block button, and a special attack button. While I wouldn’t be so quick to judge on a humble number of attacks, KUF doesn’t really allow you to combo any of these attacks together in any kind of stream attack. This leads to you just plowing through enemy after enemy pressing X a lot, with the occasional A (strong attack) to ‘mix things up’. Calling for help from your officers will be answered with an attack on your target, which will help you out a bit when you find yourself surrounded by 3 or 4 enemies at once, which, given the sheer scale of some of the battles, can be quite often.

While the combat, despite my few gripes with it, is still pretty enjoyable for a while, the RTS elements of the game seem unpolished and slag down the games otherwise well paced feel. As you make your way through the games campaigns, you’ll get to control more than one squad of men, which means bigger wars, and (theoretically) more strategy involved in placement of your armies. During one mission, I was ‘required’ to maneuver my men quickly and quietly around a forest, avoiding the enemy at the center, as to avoid their ambush and come at them from behind. Just for laughs, I disregarded my orders, and charged my men into the enemy head first, swords raised, battle cries scorching the skies. Within minutes, the enemy was slain, and my men stood victorious. What this means, when you get down to it, is that strategy can be thrown to the side during your time with KUF for a large part of it, and you can get back to slicing and dicing, which is really how you want to spend the bulk of your time with the game anyway.

Theoretically though, if you want the ‘full’ effect from KUF, you can send scouts to search areas before commanding a full frontal assault, you can set traps for enemies, or you can hide in the forest and take out coming enemies with a squad of archers. There really is a lot of different things you could do with KUFs strategy elements, but it’s really just not much fun compared to the combat.

During the games larger battles, where you find yourself controlling numerous squads, your hero character will be controlled by AI while you aren’t controlling him, to ensure he doesn’t just stand around and die during battles (he’ll just stand around and wait for you to control him again during the strategy elements). The problem though, is that he may as well stand around and do nothing for the good the AI does you. When left to the games AI for too long, you’ll find your hero getting whooped something fierce. This is made additionally frustrating by the fact that there are times during the game where you have no choice but to leave your hero so that you can issue commands to another squad.

If you still have the urge for some large scale pain after finishing the games campaigns, you can check out the Xbox Live portion of KUF. Thankfully, the online game plays lag-free for the most part, just as the single player does. The online mode only allows for 2 player fights, which is unfortunate, but what’s here works fairly well. You will go one on one against another army, with no officers to your aid, and up to 4 troops in your army. Yeah, its no where near the size of the single player mode, but let’s be fair: the idea of imitating the scale of the single player battles in multiplayer is unrealistic if you still want the game to run smoothly.

Throughout the online mode, you will be able to upgrade your army after victory. This means, that while you start off with slowly infantry, you can eventually bring your army to greatness after enough victories. This is a pretty cool addition, and really helps bring a feel of meaning to the online mode, instead of just playing to say that you played.

Throughout all my gripes with the gameplay, I have little to nothing bad to say about the games visual presentation. The game takes place in some very beautiful environments, with hundreds of characters on-screen at a time with no slowdown. The character designs are nice, and some of the Dark Legion creatures are just plain cool. Areas are varied, from forestry to plains to snow-covered wastelands. If you really put some thought into things, the areas themselves will lend themselves to ideas for strategic implementation, if that’s how you decide to go about things in KUF.

The games audio, however, is another story. KUFs soundtrack is made up of generic 80s sounding heavy rock tunes. Blaring guitars and banging drums seem very out of place in a game that takes place in such a medieval setting. Far more suiting would have been some kind of orchestrated soundtrack. Just as bad is the voice acting, which is always executed with the most bland, emotionless feel you can come across. This is unfortunate, because it distracts from the overall experience the cinematic portions of KUF brings.

I know I’ve complained about a few elements of Kingdom Under Fire, but it’s not a bad game at all. The combat, while shallow, will still offer up some fun for a while, even if the strategy elements are flawed. The online mode, while lacking any solid options other than which map to play on, will keep you coming back at least a couple times after you finish the single player modes. The mix of RTS and button mashing action was an interesting concept that could have really been something truly memorable if it weren’t for the inherit flaws in the gameplay.