Heroes is a mix of real-time strategy, RPG, and third person action all rolled into one. Usually games that try to breach genres end up being shallow in each area, but that’s not the case here. Each area is a key to success in a very tough but fair game. If you can’t position your troops to make the best use of their abilities, you will fail. If don’t level your officers and troops into appropriate jobs, you will fail. If you can’t slash away hordes of enemies with your hero, well…you won’t fail, but you could make life a lot easier.

Let’s look at each area individually. Coming from a console background, I have never had a taste for real-time strategy (turn-based, sure). I think by mitigating the number of strategic tasks you have to do in real time, they’ve made the game much more approachable for those of us who hesitate when they hear RTS. There is no base building. You never have more than a handful of troops to lead at any one time, and you rarely need to split those troops to opposite sides of the map to accomplish a task.

What it comes down to is real battle strategy. You need to move your melee troops into the front lines, perhaps even one to the front lines and one around to the archers in the back. You need to keep your archers on high ground, with the sun at their backs, and away from trees. You need to order your cavalry on paths through the enemy forces, or perhaps to tie up enemy archers to keep them from firing into your hero. You may even pull an enemy group towards your troops with a scout and use sappers to set a forest on fire as they’re running through it. Additional strategy may involve the use of SP to unleash damaging or healing spells on the battlefield.

There are many different ways to approach a map, and sometimes many ways to accomplish the task. Occasionally, the game will pigeon hole you into fighting a particular way, either due to terrain or mission objectives. Generally speaking it’s pretty open ended, from the troops you bring into the fight to how you use them. After you’re all set up for a fight, it’s time to jump into your hero for some hack and slash gameplay, but with the battlefield ever changing, you’ll need to make sharp decisions during a skirmish based upon enemy actions.

Although it’s completely optional, you’ll more than likely want to become your hero during a fight. When you start a new game, you decide which hero’s campaign you want to follow. When I say “jump into” and “become” your hero, I mean just that. You move from a bird’s eye tactical view of the battlefield to right behind your chosen hero. This portion of the game plays remarkably similar to Dynasty Warriors.

Each hero has a number of small combination attacks, XXX, XXAA, etc. You use these to cut through hundreds of enemy fighters. There are also officers in your hero’s troop which act like bodyguards, and you have access to a special ability of theirs while in melee. These abilities use the aforementioned SP and range from casting fire magic on the enemy to firing off a few rounds of arrows to healing some hit points back to your troop. As a big fan of Dynasty Warriors, I enjoy some mindless horde slashing, and by taking an active role, you leave less of the outcome of battle to chance.

If you’re successful in completing a mission, you’ll likely end up back at a base where you can make preparations for the next battle. All the kills from the previous battle are converted to experience points, as well as some extra XP for killing key targets or using appropriate strategies. So, as well as progressing the story through voice acted scenes, you’ll also be spending time upgraded your troops. If you’re like me, you’ll probably waste a lot of time in this section of the game.

XP can be spent on upgrading levels of heroes, officers, and leaders of other troops. Upgrading your hero and leaders directly connects to the level of their respective troop. You don’t just apply XP to the person though, you level up areas of expertise. Those areas of expertise are tied to the jobs that your troops can perform. If I upgrade my hero’s Melee level to 15, then I can have my troops change jobs from light infantry to knights. If I have another one of my leaders level up Melee and Teamwork, then they can become sappers. It’s a very neat class system, and with a limited amount of XP at your disposal, you need to be very careful about where you place your points.

Similarly, gold is also earned from battles and it can be spent to upgrade equipment. Again, the hero, officers, and leaders can have their equipment upgraded, but this time the troops have upgradeable items as well. Equipment can add additional enhancements to the attributes you just raised with XP. Sometimes they have extra abilities on them, like a weapon that grants 10% bonus to XP. This gold has to be managed though because aside from not being able to farm for it, you also may want to buy some mercenaries. Mercenaries are available for hire at pubs within these bases. At some point you will need one or more to fill other job roles you may not have.

Well, that’s the triple threat this game provides. With that in mind, I’ll touch on the game modes at your disposal. The main single player story is told from a single hero’s perspective. It plays out through a series of missions, each unique to the hero that was chosen, but all involving the same overarching storyline. New to Heroes, there is also a skirmish mode where you custom level a hero and their troops, choose the enemies you want to fight (or randomly assign them), and pick the map you want to fight on. There are also a couple of multiplayer modes that can be played on Live.

Unfortunately there are a few drawbacks, some of which might derail a beginner from ever giving the game a chance (please, you owe yourself to fight past these). The learning curve for KUF Heroes is steep, like the Grand Canyon walls. Somehow, the developers must’ve missed the memo that there is a lot to learn in a short amount of time because the manual is next to worthless. It could’ve contained enough information to make a small hard bound book, but instead it’s just a dozen or so pages that gloss over the main topics. I want to know things (and I still do) like does my officer’s melee attribute affect how well my troop fights. Does it affect how well he fights in melee. Does he fight in melee, or does he only attack when I use his ability? Does Ellen’s ranged attribute affect her special attack with the bow? I need the answers to those and much more.

To further aggravate the situation, you might start off with the “wrong” hero. That’s what I did. I started with Leinhart, the half-vampire and got smashed, repeatedly. He starts off at level 13, with lots of troops facing ambushes, traps, and an aerial assault. Little did I know, if I would’ve chosen Ellen first, I would have been level 2, with only her troop fighting one enemy troop. Her first couple of missions amount to the only tutorial you’re going to get, but the game doesn’t tell you that anywhere.

The next hurdle to climb is to get accustomed to the RTS controls. The manual describes how they work, so I won’t get into it, but rest assured they become second nature after a while. One thing of note, since the game won’t tell you, you can’t run from melee if you order all troops using “Y”. It only works if you move just that unit using “A”. You’ll thank me later.

There are also a few strange bugs that crop up, but only rarely. I’ve run into a bug that made my hero troop invincible. That was cool until later on it happened to an enemy troop and therefore I couldn’t finish the mission. I’ve also had some problems getting a unit to engage. No matter how many time I clicked on an enemy unit to attack, they wouldn’t ever get close enough to start melee. It’s like they had a glass box around them.

Lastly, sometimes the game forces you into impossible fights. I know they are just trying to get you to use your brain, but it’s usually dumb luck or running around the board like an idiot that solves the mystery. Ellen’s cave mission comes to mind. The game throws so many troops at you, from the front (Paladins) and the back (Dark Elves), that you can’t possibly win a head on fight. The trick is to hide out in a corner and let them fight each other, which seems kind of cool in hindsight, but there is no real clue that that would have been the solution.

I need to wrap up all this rambling, so let me just mention the audio visuals. The graphics are pretty sharp for the number of people on the screen at once. I also love the art style and direction. Camera angles are carefully chosen for each cutscene, and it’s very dramatic in a Gladiator/Braveheart kind of way. They also have a camera shake that really accentuates the feeling of troops or giant monsters marching on the field. Non-human entities are really a sight too. There are zeppelins, enormous swamp mammoths, and wyrvens dive bombing from the air. The detail and draw distance is a little better than the last couple Dynasty Warriors games too.

The music for heroes seems an odd choice, but one that I tend to enjoy. They went with heavy rock, almost metal. While it’s a little off-putting considering the medieval nature of the game, it really does energize you during the battles. Much has been debated on message boards over the voice acting, but for me it’s right there middle of the road. I think a lot of fans of the original are just upset that they changed the voice actors from The Crusaders. Interestingly enough, there are multiple language tracks on the disc including many European languages and Korean.

If you made it this far, I’m hoping you have enough interest to try Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes. The delicate mix of three genres has never been pulled off as well as this before. The difficulty is high enough that I finish most missions with very low health and sweat pouring down my face, but it’s a welcome challenge. With three starting character campaigns and four unlockable, as well as custom skirmishes and Live multiplayer, there will be plenty to keep you entertained.