Kingdom under fire 2

The 2nd day of Kingdom Under Fire II Closed Beta ended today and I spent most of night testing the game. I had a great time during the test, despite the IP block to users outside of the SEA region. Taking the extra steps to bypass the IP block was well worth my time as I am very satisfied with playing the game early. Are you wondering if KUF2 is still worth the wait and hype? Then you've come to the right spot as I will walk you through my testing experience below. Just keep in mind that this is the first English beta so the content featured in this review is bound to change.


Character creation

The first Closed Beta of Kingdom Under Fire II offered three playable characters a Male Gunslinger, Male Berserker, and a Female Spellsword. Character customization was a bit limited, but not so much that you will be seeing a lot of clones of your own character. It offered a lot of presets for hairstyles, faces, skin tone colors, etc. The palettes feature was a very nifty feature, though I didn't play around with it much. You can also fully customize facial features with sliders which is nice. No body sliders to increase height or body attributes, which means no boob sliders for you! Now let's move on to the juicy stuff of the review, shall we!?

The World - What is it like?The most commonly asked question about this game is what is the world like? Is it instanced, open-world, dungeon crawler, etc. Kingdom Under Fire II is a little bit of everything now let me explain why. The game offers a world map a bit similar to those old school RPG's where you're walking a large globe like Final Fantasy for example. In the world map, you can travel from area to area ranging from special missions, villages, towns, and more. Now let's say you want to go to town! You sail your airship to your destination and click on the place you want to enter. Once you've entered the town or city, you will find a lot of players picking up quests,TRADING, restocking, hanging out, creating guilds, and more. When you're ready to leave town, you can either go back to the World Map or walk out of town where you can continue to do your field quests a bit similar to Final Fantasy XIV. You can pick up quests outside of town randomly invite other players who are on the same quest and stuff. When you're out on the Open World part of the map or field, you won't be able to summon any of your units. Perhaps this will change in the higher level open fields? See the gameplay video below to get a general idea of what I am talking about.

It may sound a bit confusing, but once you have played the game it will become much clearer. The last part of the world feature is the instanced based dungeons or missions in this case. Most of the large scale battles take place inside instanced missions, at least during the lower level parts of the game. I've only got up to level 15, so I can't really say it would be the same later on. I was actually hoping that some of the open fields in the game would have special event quests where large sized bosses or stuff would come destroy everything. To sum things up, KUF2 offers instanced based missions, a semi open world with with different channels, a world map, and more.

Are you still confused? OK, let me explain it some more. There are different zones in KUF2 some of them you can walk from area to area. If you want to meet up a friend who is already out on the field and you're in town. You will have to zone out of town and go to his area. Proceed to ask him what channel he is playing on! From there you can quest and kill stuff together. When you get bored of killing stuff outside, you can enter missions together by walking up to the portal at certain locations of the zone. Once you get close enough to instanced area, it will ask you if you want to enter the instanced mission. Select yes and it will automatically teleport all the members of your party to that mission.

Gameplay & Controls - Action and RTS!

Kingdom Under Fire II offers non targeting action combat gameplay. The first thing I did when logging in the game was to enable always attack in the characters direction or something like that. When you're inside missions you can press the F2, F3, F4, and so on keys to control your small army. In my case, I had my melee infantry set to F2 and archers to F3. Upon pressing one of those keys, your camera will automatically switch to RTS mode. You can command your units and character in an overhead view Starcraft style. You can also press some of the keys like z, x, c. Those keys are very useful if you're lazy to go into overhead view. For example, pressing the "C" key will make all your units follow and assist you in battle. What's the point of the F2-F4 keys? When you come across large scale battles, you would want to send your infantry units at the Archers or Mortar team. Why? Because they can knock you down over and over which can become a bit of a problem when you're fighting huge bosses. The F3 and F4 keys are unlocked at later levels, the higher level you are the more units you can control during missions.

The playable characters feel a bit overpowered at the start of the game which might give players second thoughts about the higher level content of the game. I'm pretty sure the content becomes a lot harder later on. Players that I have met mentioned that they are already stuck on the level 20 missions because it's too hard to solo. Now let me go back to describing the controls, Kingdom Under Fire II does NOT have a jump key which destroys the cute little bunny inside me. I always enjoyed jumping and bunny hopping around in the MMORPG's that I play. There are two ways to defend against an enemy attack. Pressing the shift key will make your character stand and block in place for a few seconds. I rarely use this feature because it leaves me very vulnerable, perhaps it will be a lot more useful later on. The other way to defend is using the spacebar key which makes my character dash in any direction I wish. This is very useful when you want to dodge a special attack from a boss or leap towards enemies swiftly.

Graphics - Amazingly Optimized!

You would think that I would lag especially when recording while running this game in superior resolution, but I didn't lag at all. The game is extremely optimized and I was able to record large scale battles without the game slowing down. Can you even imagine how big my FRAPS files were!? YES, I still use FRAPS for 2k and 4k recording because of 100% quality. My gameplay footages was a lot bigger than the game for sure! The graphics was good, but not amazing like the upcoming next generation titles. Kingdom Under Fire II's selling point resides in the massive amounts of units on the screen and smooth gameplay like no other. Even today, not a lot of games can handle rendering so many units at once. Is there any other game that can support up to 10,000 units without FPS loss? Kingdom Under Fire II doesn't even require high PC specs and is already being ported over to the PS4 in the future.

Pretend you're playing the Total War series and the graphics is ten times better! My FPS was always above 60+ when I wasn't recording. When recording, I limit my FPS down to Youtube's 30 FPS CAP. I wish I could share some 60 FPS gameplay footage with you guys, it's a lot more amazing. Please don't give me the 60 FPS is not visible by the human eye crap. Hmmm.. what else. Don't expect any lush vibrant beautiful looking colors at the start of the game, most of the low level open world areas are desolated wastelands. As for the map size, I guess it's around medium sized a bit similar to Final Fantasy XIV 2.0 maps. For the mission or instances, there is a lot  more variety during the first fifteen levels of the game. Ranging from forests, town invasion, field missions, and so on. I am currently playing the female Spellsword character and she is flashy in many ways. That sounded wrong, but her skills have a lot of crazy magical effects, I often lose myself in battle because of this. I suppose the other two characters are less flashy and more manly.

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