There are few obvious problems with how Kingdoms plays but plenty of more subtle ones. The cutscenes prove to be the biggest incentive to play through the campaign, which is unfortunate since Kingdoms should be at least as enjoyable to play as it is to watch. And aside from the quirkier escort and defense missions, you're stuck with the usual formula of having to wipe out all your enemies. The Total Annihilation engine apparently isn't equipped to handle complex scripted situations, and so the missions' supposed surprises and twists tend to be underwhelming. While the cutscenes are often interesting, just as often, the missions themselves are not. The single-player campaign spans nearly 50 missions, each of which is preceded by a cutscene that sets the stage for the ensuing battle. Though the countries involved in the conflict each have opposing morals and ideals, the soundtrack suggests little evidence of this and drones slowly and similarly for all four sides.Īt least the story holds up rather well, which is told as though it were a historical narrative, through the static painting montage style of documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.
Even the game's soundtrack leaves something to be desired, and while the orchestral score is the work of the same Jeremy Soule who lent Total Annihilation its incredible soundtrack, the music in Kingdoms is a missed opportunity to play up the differences between the four warring factions. If the various units sounded interesting, that might have gone a long way toward lending the game the sort of personality and idiosyncrasy that helped make Blizzard's real-time strategy games so popular.Īt other times, the sound in Kingdoms seems altogether unfinished, and events for which you'd expect audible cues, like unit construction and healing, are strangely silent. But in Kingdoms, which is evidently modeled after Blizzard's character-driven real-time strategy games, the sound effects are mediocre and often downright bad and cannot be excused as easily because the game professes to have so much more context than its predecessor. The dozens of robotic units in Total Annihilation could be easily forgiven for their plain mechanical noises, which seemed appropriate even if altogether uninspiring. Yet while Kingdoms' graphics aren't all that bad, it's difficult to find anything nice to say about the game's sound effects.
#Total annihilation kingdoms retrospective software#
Even if you have a very fast machine, you'll still find that the game's frame rate bogs down noticeably during large-scale battles on account of the software rendering, which not only makes the game look worse than it could have, but proves to be a serious detriment during gameplay. The Kingdoms graphics engine, only slightly enhanced since Total Annihilation, makes limited use of 3D acceleration to accentuate certain special effects but does not take advantage of your card in order to enhance the game's frame rate or smooth the edges on the polygons. The flat 2D backdrops aren't much better, and the 3D units clash against them much like they did in Cavedog's first game. The consequence is that it's not so easy to tell one unit from the next in Kingdoms, and while some look distinctive, such as the kingdom Veruna's massive warships and dirigibles or Zhon's squid-like krakens, many or even most others look plain at best and messy at worst. Although the graphics in Kingdoms are more detailed than those of its science fiction-themed precedent, the jagged-edged polygonal graphic style was far better suited to the rough-hewn metallic shapes of Total Annihilation than the more organic style of Kingdoms' designs. You can begin to see what's wrong with it right from the start. And while Kingdoms does include four different playable factions and a much more interesting story than Total Annihilation did, Cavedog's second game suffers from a long list of problems that collectively prevent it either from exceeding its ancestor or from rejuvenating a tired genre. A year and a half later, Cavedog is trying to follow suit with Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, a fantasy real-time strategy game that is an apparent effort to reclaim the interest of Total Annihilation fans.
It isn't often that an upstart game company breaks through with a major hit, but when Cavedog released Total Annihilation in late 1997, that's what happened.
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