PC Gamer - January 2012

Your men will face wave after wave of giants, dragons, and monsters. Sweet.

Wander around the campaign map and you’ll find quests.

Play as evil Arthur or kind-hearted king: your choice.

King Arthur 2 builds on the strengths of the first game.

There’s also more emphasis on RPG elements like loot. Magic items were common rewards in King Arthur, so much so that you often ended up with more than you needed. Now taking three surplus items to the artifact shop will let you forge them into a single, more powerful object. Which items you use will influence the end result, but there’s a degree of randomization. The whole process reminded me of Diablo II’s Horadric Cube, and should add a welcome layer of customization to in-game items.

Storage space

The artifact shop is home to one of the game’s more unusual innovations: they now act as a kind of “cloud storage” for items. Anything be dropped off at one shop can then be picked up from any of the others, with a similar system for troops placed in castles. It might sound silly, but it’s certainly

better than having two armies take a six-month detour just so their generals can exchange trinkets.

King Arthur includes moments of narrative role-playing in addition to the numbers game. The quests from the first game—choose-your-own-adventure moments where you decided how your Knight would deal with certain situations— are now bigger and more complex. When I played, I had to win a debate in the Senate regarding my family duties. There were several layers and branches of conversation, resulting in something far deeper than the short and simple quests of the first game.

King Arthur 2 isn’t going to reinvent the first game; it doesn’t need to. It takes the strong ideas and setting of the first game and makes them bigger, better, and more polished than ever before. Total War may finally have a real challenger. TomHatfield