Get past the voice acting and through the first mission and you'll be unable to stop!

User Rating: 8.7 | Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders XBOX
The more you get into the game, the less you'll care about the small flaws that are so noticable from the very beginning. I'll admit that my time spent playing this game is limited so far, but having said that, it only goes to prove that you can quickly get past the weak voice acting and start enjoying the positive elements of the game. Even with the less than spectacular voice acting you quickly become involved in an interesting story line right after the first mission. The writing for the banter between characters seems obviously translated, but never the less it doesn't fail to grab your attention. Learning the ropes with the ingame instructions was painless to start and slowly eases you into the more in depth features of the game as you progress. The best part of the learning experience is that it's NOT a linear tutorial. You learn on the fly while you are already beginning to develop your own play style. Because of the variation available from the begining, it's not a streach to say that even the first tutorial mission is worth playing over again to try something different. This is a great indication to extent of the open ended play style of this game. Getting down to the gritty button mashing we find that it's quite easy to slash your way around a battle field. This is great for the less skilled players to get in and have fun at their own pace. The trick is trying to control the battle field and eliminate the foes in an efficient manner, which will indeed require adding some logic to the usual button mash. The tactics is where you begin to see a difference in KUF and any other comparable game. Once you start controling more than one troop and realize the depth to the strategy element of this game, you'll be blown away! That is, if you're the strategy gaming type. Be aware that the missions for the easy heros are somewhat preplanned and the REAL creative strategy doesn't fully hit you untill you try out the "HARD" hero missions. Once you've seen the first couple of missions from your first selected hero, you begin to understand how much time you're going to spend on this game, but you'll soon find that time consumption will double when you advance to the "HARD" hero missions. You have four full story lines to follow through, each with it's unique style and flavour. This game is among the best values for gameplay I've ever come across. And that's not even including the ability to take an army online and go head to head over Xbox Live. Overall I'd have to say that skeptics will be hard pressed to get past the game intro without saying "I knew it would suck" but as soon as you're past your tutorial, the game will begin changing your mind. This game has stuck a new balance of gaming elements that is sure to carry on in future incarnations and grow in popularity.