King Arthur 2 will crash to desktop a lot more than you’ll actually get to play and the freezes are quite annoying — that’s my experience with the game. Neocore, the developer of this game, hasn’t been up to the task when it comes to technical proficiency — and overall, it’s quite disappointing that an open platform like PC gets an unoptimized mess like this. There are no consoles to blame here, too.

There are fun moments in the game, where you get to vaporize entire armies with your army. It is simple, ruthless and exciting — but can be a little repetitive as well. Not to mention a huge clusterfuck in some situations. It’s a real time tactical strategy game, somewhat like Total War: Shogun 2, but unlike that game, this game is no where close when it comes to quality.

There are also a lot of RPG mechanics here, which usually tries to make you more attached to the characters — well, it does work in most cases. You control your army via an overhead map, and sometimes when plenty of units are clashing, you tend to sometimes lose the track of who is where. But those are expected, and a little color coding would have been nice.

The story premise is very interesting. You don’t play as King Arthur but his son, William Pendragon. The situation is grave, as the King is suffering from a wound that doesn’t heal, and the Knights of the Round Tables are missing for some reason, and there is an invasion imminent on the land. You have to unite everyone and of course repel the invasion.

You do get access to plenty of quests, some of them are generic and some of them, really interesting. Ultimately, they all end up being somewhat same, so they aren’t that remarkable in any way. Although, the quest narration is pretty good, and the voice acting is adept. There isn’t a lot of consistency here, though.

The way you handle these quests also depend on what type of relations are created. If you play devilishly and double cross someone, expect some hostile relations later. People can find some interesting quests here, but as I mentioned above they aren’t that special at all.

There is magic in the game. You can have our mages pummel the enemy with fireballs, or use a defensive unit to beef up defenses. The battles are quite complex sometimes with the AI providing some good challenge, and there are plenty of tactical options available to you. The game can be breezed through on the default difficulty quite easily.

You can also capture cities here, and the bonus they give are used to buff up your enemies; they’re mostly insignificant at best. it doesn’t hurt in capturing them, though, so go ahead. The game could have been much better, but the studio it seems — required more time here and, probably more money. King Arthur 2 is an enjoyable romp, but only if you haven’t tasted Shogun 2 yet; if you have — then don’t bother with this, seriously.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

Now Paradox Interactive are mostly a cool bunch who have created award winning games. Their latest release, King Arthur 2 is plagued with a lot of problems, especially with regards to performance, where it can drop down to 20-30 fps.

Now, instead of admitting it’s a big performance issue, a developer from Neocore games took to their official forums and started defending it in a way that is totally absurd. He said that 24fps is “fine for the human eye”, while ignoring the fact that all content isn’t same.

“It is not bad performance and not too low. If it gets below 20 FPS than it is bad performance,” he said.

“24 FPS is what a human eye sees as fluid and you watch the films in the cinema with 24 FPS – do you go to cinema again and again to see bad performance and horribly low FPS?

“Where you need a higher FPS are mainly the action games, particularly if you play them in multiplayer.

“Generally our aim was to set the game to 24+FPS, of course after the graphical settings have been set to the specific hardware (this is what the Auto Setup does – it also recognizes other issues like driver problems and such, so if you think that the auto setup has set you lower results than your hardware would deserve, there are most likely some problems in your rig that you should find),” he concluded.

Now, I totally reject this justification, because for a PC game, 24fps is simply too low and it is entirely the fault of the developer here.

When he talks about “cinema”, he doesn’t realize it is captured in a totally different way compared to games. Movies usually add blur to relax the eyes at 24fps, while in games – the low fps is easily noticeable.

The game isn’t too demanding or pushes the bar in anyway according to me, so it is unfortunate that such sort of comments are being said by developers.

You can check out his detailed reply about other issues afflicting the game, here. Check out the 60fps vs 24fps comparison video below. Youtube has a 30fps limit, so you can download the original video here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNEEAkOnSuY