Game Reviews

Kingdom Heroes Review

by admin posted May 20,2010

Kingdom Heroes is another Chinese F2P MMORPG set in Three Kingdoms period. The game is now in second closed beta. here is a review from Zanpakutou.

Story:

The story is the same as always. You have to join up with 1 of the 3 major factions during the era of the three kingdoms. They are Wei, Wu, and Shu. Each faction has different principles but they make no real difference. It only serves to determine who you play with and who you end up fighting against when the time for conflicts come.

Graphics:

The graphics are nothing spectacular by today’s standards. They are below average, but still better than some of the other stuff out there. There’s a limited number of faces and hair styles to choose from, but its enough for you to be able to make a small distinction between you and other players. However, its not enough to make a unique character. Your equipment will determine how you mainly look.

Gameplay:

You begin the game by choosing your character. You have a choice between a warrior, bow user, magic support, or magic offense. Its the same roles but they just rename stuff. Both magic classes are quite similar but have different abilites. For a majority of this review, I used the warrior class because i disliked the ranged characters.

Character creation is simple. You pick your class, 2 different character bases for each gender, a hair style, hair color and skin color. Its simple, but it allows you to get some distinction between yourself and another players. Your equipment affects the way you look so that will be more important in determining your look in the long run. There are 6 stats. Strength, dexterity, intelligence, willpower, constitution, and charisma. Strength affects the damage of your attacks. Dexterity affects attack speed, critical rate, and dodge rate. Intelligence affects magic damage. Willpower increases magic defense and maximum mp. Charisma affects your cap on bodyguards (more on that later).

Skills are learned through NPCs. You only need to meet the level requirement and then pay for the cost of the skill to upgrade it. Skills are very useful and spamming is possible for all classes. Just make sure you can pay for the MP cost which is fairly low overall. You also get talent points that you can apply to receive various bonuses. It is recommended that you stay to 1 type and avoid diversifying too much. Diversifying is good at first, but you are penalized later on when you can no longer invest into the high end bonuses which are drastically better than the others.

The gameplay is your basic point and click but with the option for WASD movement and the near pointless jump feature. Skills are used by targetting the enemy and pressing the hotkey. In essence, its the same as a majority of the MMOs out there right now. I personally prefer the WASD for this game because you can just take some shortcuts. However, auto move is very useful for finding quests.

This game is a grinder. There is no doubt about that. There are quests early on up to about lvl 15, but after that, quests are few in number and you will spend most of your time grinding. However, the bodyguard system is a nice way to reduce the amount of grind. It is in essence an automatic botting system. You can set your bodyguards to attack whatever is close and you still get the loot and exp you normally would but you can do this without actually playing. Just set them to seek and destroy in a week area, leave it on overnight, and see the results in the morning.

The bodyguard system is probably the most unique feature of the game. Depending on your class, you can have a varying number of bodyguards. Warriors I believe are the only ones restricted to 2. The other classes can use 6. In order to use bodyguards, you need charisma. Each bodyguard costs a certain amount of charisma (5 at first, 10 after upgrade) and without charisma you cannot place them into your formation. Bodyguards help the player fight and can take hits for the player as well. This can be used as a botting system by setting them to seek and destroy as long as they don’t die. The benefit is that it greatly reduces the grind. If they die, loyalty goes down and you have to go to the NPC to revive them. The ranged classes will have to spend a lot of points on charisma to use the maximum number of bodyguards. This greatly costs them in other stats.

In game, there is a calendar that displays the event times. Using this, you can determine when events are held regardless of which time zone you live in. Its based on PST, but its still very useful for those who want to join the various events in the game. At this point, I have not reached lvl 30 so I can’t participate in the events yet.

Guilds:

There’s nothing special about guilds here other than being able to control regions. Controlling a region allows you to receive the taxes that have been collected so far. It currently costs 10 gold (aka 1000 silver aka 100000 copper) to make one which is quite a lot.

Overall:

There’s nothing special here, just your average Three Kingdoms MMO. The only thing special here is the bodyguard system but everything still feels poorly done. The interface is decent and they worked hard to keep the clutter to a minimum. However, it just feels lacking in depth.

Final Score:

5/10 – It has potential, but its poorly executed.

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