Genre : Action/Adventure
Developer : Krome Studios
Publisher : Konami
Release Date : November 16, 2004

You know, after all this talk about 2004 being the year when movie -to-videogame tie-ins finally stopped scraping the bowels of mediocrity (Chronicles of Riddick, Spider-Man 2, and quite possibly the upcoming Batman Begins game), it’s pretty disheartening to see that we’re right back on our way to square one again.

(Catwoman doesn’t count—as bad as it was, it was still better than its source material by about 5% or so.)

Criminitely.

So, we’ve got King Arthur: The Movie: The Game over here. What’s it like? Well, so far we’ve had a good amount of Lord of the Rings beat-em-up games, all featuring fast-paced hack-and-slash fun, an experience system, unlockable content, switchable characters, and upgradeable moves and techniques.

King Arthur… is exactly the same as these, right down to the cutscenes where compressed movie footage transists to game-engine rendered cinematics. As a nifty bonus, depending on which stage is being played, different characters can be selected for use (and unlocked after they’re used or encountered), though the experience you gain throughout the single-player quest carries on to all of the usable characters.

On paper, this doesn’t sound like all too bad an idea. If you’re going to ape a game formula almost down to the letter, it’s often a solid bet if you give yourself a good foundation to start from. Of course, if you do try to ape another game’s style, and fail at it, your attempt at it becomes that much more obvious, and your failure that much more dismal.

Guess what happened here, folks?

Yeah.

In the end, what we have here is an attempt to reproduce the aforementioned Lord of the Rings games, only lacking in several key factors that made those games fun. These key factors include, in no particular order: control, polish, graphics, a good soundtrack, and a fun factor that makes you want to come back for more no matter how many times you got your butt kicked.

The control, indeed, is pretty scary, and is what really drags this game down. It seems easy and intuitive enough, until you actually try to implement it. Timing between button presses and actual attacks are very much off, and once you do manage to get the hang of attacks, odds are they’ll have gotten out-prioritized by the enemy’s moves and AI anyway. What fun is wielding two swords with Lancelot (one of the higher points of the game, actually) if an enemy’s fist can easily cancel out your attack just by meeting his blades… causing you to take damage?

From melee attacking to the lock-on system, the whole ordeal is just sloppy. Archery is just as bad, thanks to its dependence on said lock-on system, which makes it tough to select who you wish to shoot. Even with manual selection, if your character moves (let’s say he wants to avoid the arrows that are being shot back at him while picking off enemy archers), odds are the crosshairs will automatically change to whatever enemy he ends up being nearest to.

By far the worst is the game’s “innovative horseback battle system.” I suppose it’s “innovative” because it hasn’t been attempted that often—after its showcase here, I do not think it should be tried again. Your character rides a horse, which, from the outset, makes him a bigger target for enemies to hit. Your offensive options are drive-by slashing, which may or may not hit the enemy depending on the alignment of the stars; front-kicking and back-kicking from the horse, which may or may not hit the enemy depending on the alignment of the planets, and finally, trampling the enemy underfoot, which actually does work reliably, but requires that the left trigger be pressed to do so when near the enemy (instead of, you know, the much more intuitive method of walking over the fallen enemy character model) when over the opponent. Seeing as any single form of attack knocks down the enemy, but never, ever finishes them off, there are countless times when you will have to employ the following procedure:

- If there are archers hanging around in the background , try to take them out, but be warned; even if you try to dodge their arrows, odds are that at least five will find their way into your flesh.
- Ride by, slashing and kicking at enemies, watch them fall down and twitch.
- Turn around with the horse (which takes forever, and if new enemies spawn, they are allowed to slash at you helpelessly).
- Go back to the fallen enemies, get the ones you missed, if any, then use the left trigger to trample each and every one of them over one at a time, and then hope like crazy that one of them dropped a health potion, because a quarter of your health is now very likely gone from that skirmish, even though you did your best with the tools at hand.

I kid you not; the second stage, where this system was introduced, nearly made me throw this disc against the wall. Normal games of this type aren’t supposed to do that until at least the fifth or so.

The game looks… all right. Another one of those middleware rendering systems, no doubt—I’d be surprised if it weren’t. I have no idea why the pictures on the back of the game’s box look twice as good as what I saw on my S-Video display, but… yeah. To the game’s credit, it allows for grand battles showing tons of characters onscreen, which makes for pretty impressive melee fights. If only it were possible to actually get in hits during said grand melees without resorting to arrow-sniping. If not for the multi-character impressiveness, however, the game’s looks as a whole would be incredibly disappointing. Even as it stands, as the game throws crowds of characters at you to fight (many of which get in each other’s way), you won’t be admiring the technical prowess, you’ll be cursing at the game as your flailing weapons fail to hit the enemy.

For the first few stages, I honestly didn’t notice any music. Oh, it was there, don’t get me wrong—but all it is is generic Hollywood movie score. Even the old Lord of the Rings games were guilty of such things, but it just falls flat on its face here, because hardly any of the tracks sound different from each other in any way. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if the same song got used for all the stages. It probably wasn’t, but it may as well have been. The voice-acting is passable at best, consisting of quips from the movie and their actors. The greatest achievement, again, lies in the fact that, like the graphics, the sound is quite adequate in providing the illusion of a grand battle taking place. Weapons clang and clash with clarity, tons of roaring voices can be heard everywhere around you, and you almost get into it. Almost. Then you die.

The game also includes some extras, such as multi-player battle and co-op modes, featuring a variety of characters that are unlockable as you progress through the game, but also featuring the same shortcomings as the main game, thereby canceling out their usefulness.

King Arthur had a chance to be a decent addition to a genre of games that have been around since videogaming’s infancy, with a few tricks to call its own. However, the lack of execution makes this a title to avoid, especially in the face of superior titles which got it right the first time, and then repeated to do so.

Score: 6.0/10