Kingdom of Heroes: Tactics War – 2020 First Impressions and Thoughts

Kingdom of Heroes: Tactics War is a brand new RPG released a week or two ago I think? I’d seen ads for it all over social media and figured I’d go ahead and jump on in as it looked incredible.
The game starts you off with an introduction: You’re King Arthur – or, you’re Arthur, at least, and you’re given Excalibur. Then you’re thrown through a few tutorials, mainly combat tutorials but for the most part, they allow you to actually skip them.
This is something I wish other games would allow you to do and I appreciate seeing, as if you’ve played one RPG like this.. you’ve played ’em all.

I thought this was going to be another basic RPG where you fight one or two waves of enemies but otherwise have no other form of engagement, but I was happily mistaken.
Instead, while yes the game features chapters and missions – with each chapter having various missions to tackle, the gameplay – the combat itself is turn-based, and allows for direct control over your characters’ placement and therefore has an element of strategy.
Think of it like a Final Fantasy Tactics or Fire Emblem game. You have a grid, and you move your characters to gain an appropriate advantage over your enemies, with ranged units being able to attack from a distance, and melee requiring you to be right up in their face.
While you can definitely auto-combat this, the encounters get progressively more difficult and therefore it’ll likely end up requiring you pay a little attention to what you’re doing.

Missions and chapters have quite a bit of story associated with them, with the story actually being pretty solid. I did notice that the translations were quite poor though, which is surprising to me in this day and age. This is the first time I’ve seen translations this bad in a game released after 2019.
But then I saw that the game was from Neowiz.. the people behind Bless Online, and it all made sense.

Characters and character models in-game were alright. Nothing great, but man were the character portraits of the heroes incredible. These were more detailed than 90% of the games I’ve played on this channel.
Special effects and abilities in combat were also very high quality.

Overall the game looks fantastic – aesthetically, anyway, and I couldn’t be happier wasting time in a game that looks as good as this does.
I wish the translations were better though as it was a little off putting reading through everything and trying to make sense of some of it.
I’m not sure how bad the Gacha system is in the game as I never really concern myself with it unless I’m going to play the game long-term. I’m normally happy moving through the game and its story, then moving on to another game.