Review by: William Abner

A complaint you often hear from gamers is how publishers love to milk franchises for all they are worth; they’ll develop unnecessary sequels that simply recycle an old formula. We call that phenomena “MOTS” or More of the Same. I can’t place that criticism at the feet of King Arthur II and what’s more surprising is that I wish I could.

The original King Arthur was a hybrid of Total War, stat based role-playing and a choose your own adventure book. (Do you punch the dragon in the face? Turn to page 34. Do you offer it cake? Turn to page 187.) It was part overland map strategy game with province management, army recruitment and logistics, and part role-playing/adventure as you stumbled upon text-only adventures on your way to unifying Britannia. Then there were the tactical battles that behaved, somewhat, like a Total War game without a lot of the actual wargame trappings but with the added hook of spells and giants.

While everyone’s resistance to difficulty spikes in games varies, I found King Arthur to be a brutally difficult game, and one that was plagued by a lot of early release bugs. When you combined those two it was a hard game to love – but one that you could see a great deal of potential in if Neocore could iron everything out.

So along comes King Arthur II and instead of taking that old formula and making it better Neocore simply up and changed the game. If you look at the screenshots it certainly looks like the old game (albeit a little prettier) but don’t be fooled – this is very much a different animal all together.