IGN rates KoH a mere 7.7 in overall

[Henrik]

Hey guys

I have read an review of KoH at the IGN site and they gave it a 7.7 overall score which is sad IMO :nono:


From IGN

Closing Comments
It's a shame that Knights of Honor has come along at a time when it's going to be completely overshadowed by other recent releases in the genre. And while it might be unreasonable to expect every game to live up to the standard of Rome: Total War there are plenty of other, better options out there for the real-time strategy fan.

Knights of Honor is definitely a step above Lords of the Realm in terms of realism but this sometimes comes at the cost of accessibility and convenience. Gamers can have fun with this one but they'll definitely need a bit more patience to get what they're looking for.


I must agree with IGN

I also think that the demo should have been release a lot earlier, because then we would have had a chance to tweak some of the minor details which needs to fixed - it is my hope that if/when we'll see a KoH2 then these things will be changed - i.e. forexample an earlier release of a demo etc.

However i'm still gonna buy it, but not because i think it is the greatest game outthere, but because i wanna give something back to the devs for makeing such a great community...

[Finellach]

Man they are boring with crap such as RTW....KoH is by far better game and it's not everything in massive number of units and graphics....not by a longshot...

[Cork2]

first of all pretty much all the reviewer or stupid monkeys, they wouldn't know whats good if it came and bit them in their buts. Also it is like one person reviewing the game and he doesn't speak for everyone. :D

[rado907]

well ign gave high score to doom3 and doom3 ****ed so bad it wasn't even funny.
not to mention other games.

so just ignore the reviews.
play it and decide for yourself...

or check user reviews (at gamefaqs.com or amazon.com), there after a few have been accumulated you can get a good impression.

[Shimo]

KOH is a game I am going to play over and over and over again, because even when the novelty of it dies down, the immersive gameplay will keep me comming back for more.

[Sir Turylon]

Know what? as an advid American gamer, I will not be buying Rome:Total War or Battle for Middle Earth.. either. One reason. When I think of rome, I think of more than just fancy battlefield graphics. When I think of LotR, I think of role playing not building units and playing rts games.

KoH, however, will be the next purchase for me. (as soon as I get this P2400 gone and get the nice Athlon64 3.2ghz processor and that 1,024mb of DDR400 memory with a Geforce FX5750 128mb card. ;) ) It is just... funner. much more enjoyable than R:TW would be for me. Two games I've been looking forward to a long time.. KoH and Battlefield: Vietnam.

so kudos @ Black Sea and Sunflowers for making a game BETTERthan Rome:Total War. :go:

content > graphics. imho.

[Stefan]

well ign gave high score to doom3 and doom3 ****ed so bad it wasn't even funny.
not to mention other games.

so just ignore the reviews.
play it and decide for yourself...

or check user reviews (at gamefaqs.com or amazon.com), there after a few have been accumulated you can get a good impression.

The problem is that not all stores have return polices, many do not in fact, as a result just buying a game that turns out to be not what u wanted is a waste of money. Reviews are just 1 way people find out about a game and see wha others think of it. Obviously everyone has their opinion, however this reviwer problem has experience reviewing dozens and dozens of games. On top of that he has probably played dozens of them as well so i think its fair for people to at least consider his opinion valid. rating 7.7 doesnt mean that everyone will just consider the game "ok", it just means its not something that everyone will be able to easily enjoy, and may be better suited to simply fans of the genre.


Myself i agree that it will be overshadowed by RTW, in fact im willing to bet this is going to severly hurt the sales of KOH. Also having played RTW i must say playing that MP over lan is a lot more fun then playing KOH over lan.

[rado907]

The problem is that not all stores have return polices, many do not in fact, as a result just buying a game that turns out to be not what u wanted is a waste of money. Reviews are just 1 way people find out about a game and see wha others think of it. Obviously everyone has their opinion, however this reviwer problem has experience reviewing dozens and dozens of games. On top of that he has probably played dozens of them as well so i think its fair for people to at least consider his opinion valid. rating 7.7 doesnt mean that everyone will just consider the game "ok", it just means its not something that everyone will be able to easily enjoy, and may be better suited to simply fans of the genre.


Myself i agree that it will be overshadowed by RTW, in fact im willing to bet this is going to severly hurt the sales of KOH. Also having played RTW i must say playing that MP over lan is a lot more fun then playing KOH over lan.
play demos....
and as i said, read user reviews rather than "proffssional" ones...
most of the time they give much better reviews...

i wanna be a pro-reviewer for a big magazine some day, i mean it's so retarded it's not even funny, just learn to write half-decently and then give high scores to every overhyped piece of crap the distriibutors of which pay up for adds....

and on top, RTW bored me to death very quickly, but that's probably cuz I played lotsa MTW 2 years ago... (RTW is just too similar)

RTW is pretty hyped, and advertisment sells, granted.... whether it's better than KoH is another question.

still, i've yet to play KOH full to see if I like it better.... meh.

in conclusion, to reiterate, big game magazines ****. getting endorsed by them is nice, but doesn't really mean much imo ...

:)

[Stefan]

Demos are not always avalible, and they dont always tell the whole story of the product in questiosn. In fact since demos try and illustrate all the good points of a game you will not see the bugs and other problematic issues that may be present in a full version. User reviews stand to be just as biased as "professional" reviews if not more biased (because they are often based on little playtime) The best option is generally to view a variety of sources before making a purchasing decision. In the case of RTW it has recieved great user reviews from what i have seen.

[Wynche]

I can understand some of the reviewer's concerns, but I certainly don't see the reason why he gives the music a rate of 7.0
It deserves much better, I think.
What is your opinion?

[Henrik]

I can understand some of the reviewer's concerns, but I certainly don't see the reason why he gives the music a rate of 7.0
It deserves much better, I think.
What is your opinion?

My opinion is that Glorian and his music ROCK ! - i don't think that the reviewer has given any points for the mood-setting aspect in the music - in my opinion music is there to set the mood and help to support the atmosphere in a scene - maybe the reviewer said to himself: "ohhh, it's got some music - well, lets give it a 7.0 for that one and i'm out of here !"

[Sir Turylon]

Lemme just state something for ya'll. IGN is biased towards anything that doesn't have 3-dimensional graphics. If a game has 3D graphics and no content, the game will still be considered great. need proof? read their review of Dungeon Siege. I've played Dungeon Siege so much that I can take any one of you through a tour of both the main gaming environments released with the game. Sure, it's pretty to look at and the hacking and frying of monsters is great... but it lacks total depth. What did IGN rate it? 8.5
IGN Bias (http://pc.ign.com/articles/356/356757p1.html)

BTW, I'd give DS a rating of

5.0 for presentation, since the menu was sleek but hard to move around in MP games. (once you left an ongoing game, you had to start over in main menu unless it was on their zonematch server)

6.0 for graphics. The scenes are pretty to look at and there is a lot of eye candy... but the camera really restricts your view.

4.0 for sound. The music was good, but the rest of the sound was purely pathetic. your units never talked if clicked on.. No sound if they got hit... or if you told them to move. The dialogue was horrible. spell sounds were pretty much done in 5 individual wavbits. fire ball, casting sound. lightning cast, ice cast, and buffering your character.

3.0 for gameplay. Is this day of Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind, you'd expect a new RPG to actually have a plot that has more depth than. "Go to this town, talk to this person, take this item, kill that monster, beat the end boss" The only shining point was multiplayer, and the fact you could go anywhere in the MP "environment." SIngleplayer was as boring as playing pong against yourself.

2.0 for lasting appeal. Once again.. once you beat the SP campaign... you're done. Just run around in MP and hack more stuff up. Only saving point is the MP experience.. but even the MP is very buggy and more than 4 people in an internet game can lag the game to unplayability.

The reviewer obviously did not care about content. His only concern was being able to walk up next to a waterfall and look over the edge.

Edit: I'd just like to quote one thing to show how out-of-touch the reviewer from IGN was.
Moreover it's not that easy to spot the towns on the map. The presence of numerous smaller holdings around the towns is tactically significant but since the minimap doesn't place icons to show you where the central towns are, you may find yourself actually unclear about where your towns are or even how many of them you have.

the minimap DOES place icons for each central province town. I geuss the reviewer never bothered to click on the farthest button which switches between political and strategic view for the minimap and click the zoom icon to see the little castle icons representing the capitals of each province. Maybe the reviewer was writing this up before he had his double expresso mocha low-fat latte with his kiwi almond bagel. :rofl:

[hulkster225]

I agree with IGN on the graphics rating, but thats about it. Yes, the 2D graphics are nicely detailed on some things, but the units are so hard to tell apart, and I dont like that. The other aspects of the game should have gotten higher ratings though. On a side note, I suspect that those who are bashing Rome Total War haven't played it, because it is a GREAT game, just because you are a fan of KoH doesn't mean you have to hate other games in the genre, I am a fan of both.

[Finellach]

RTW is turn based strategy....thats all I need to know not to play it. Thank you very much....

[William Blake]

Now I read the ign review and I was... stunned not to say outraged.

The guy complains that he cant find his cities on the map and 50(!) different buildings "look the same" For the love of god, if a building icon is small and pretty like they are in KoH how could you expect to memorize 50 different of them?

He also says some amazing bull**** like "Still, there's very little reason for a unit of swordsmen to fear a unit of peasants regardless of any other disadvantages in the area of terrain and disposition." Exactly in what game same number of pesants can beat more expencive, better armed and armored unit of swordsmen one on one? I would love to see it. But we all know that for the SAME money you can get more peasants and more pesants can kick swordsmen all over the map. On the other hand Feudal knights can suffer terrible losses from cheap spearmen if you use spearmen right.

He said units looked "outdated"... hm let me think, maybe that UGLY 3-poligon, low quality texture soldiers they use in Rome:Total War is "cutting-edge". But wow you can rotate a camera there so you can see them closely and ugly and dont see a battle, or zoomout and see actually command looking on units as squares filled with color.

By the way, the guy has black and white monitor: "Everything has a bit of a grainy, slightly dingy look to it which, though it may be in keeping with historical accuracy, but some color would definitely have helped the game" Now tell me please what color you can possibly ADD to KoH? Neon would be enough? The game just plain BEST possibly looking, and dont mention zooms, I'm talking about picture you see, no 3d strategy can even get close to KoH view at any zoom settings. "Bit of grainy" my ***.


Well anyway, I felt like the in guy was so angry on Black Sea then they didnt pay him for good review, that he spent 10 minutes playing, 15 minutes writing the review and fooled his editor saying "here you go, 3 days work, I'm so tired".

I just hope devs understand that and dont get upset by such "Reviews"

[hulkster225]

"maybe that UGLY 3-poligon, low quality texture soldiers they use in Rome:Total War is "cutting-edge". But wow you can rotate a camera there so you can see them closely and ugly and dont see a battle, or zoomout and see actually command looking on units as squares filled with color."

Again I say, you obviously are completely biased towards KoH or haven't played Rome Total War with the graphical settings on any decent level. The soldiers in RTW are quite detailed and for the most part it is easy to distinguish the unit types from each other, which is a problem I had with KoH. In other areas KoH may be better than RTW but unit details on the battle map is definitely not one of them.

[rado907]

RTW is not ugly, heh.
It's stunning, in fact.
and it runs reasonably well, too.

but KoH has some advantages over RTW, for sure.

anyway, comparing the 2 games is dumb, there's an easy solution - buy and enjoy both ;-).

[William Blake]

I very biased towards any "full 3d strategy" there the "our amazing next level 3d engine" rules over the gameplay itself. Which is the case in TW.

I look at RTW and see ugly units, like here
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2004/screen0/589390_20040930_screen010.jpg

Look at the command pannel - it's like 1996 is here again. Look at the chariots - 2 and a half polygons, look at the catapults - they are just plain ugly with wood texture from mid 90s. And this aint no my "poor" settings its gamepost "top noutch" system.

Look at campaing map, its nothing near KoH
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2004/screen0/589390_20040930_screen008.jpg

And such beloved close zoom like here
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2004/screen0/589390_20040930_screen004.jpg

or

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2004/screen0/589390_20040930_screen009.jpg

You can't possibly command your troops in this view, because you dont see ****. So from the gameplay perspective its totaly useless. But its so-called "interactive movies" approach dont care about gameplay, it cares about "wow" factor, like "wow you can see a face of every legioner, wow there is a 3d grass, wow flaming pigs".

Well obviously RTW has good ideas and feauters, but its not the point. All Im saying is that graphically KoH and RTW are very different because the basic gameplay design. And most of RTW feaures make the picture looks worse then it might be brining nothing to the gampley itself. And in KoH picture looks great, no matter what ign or anyother guy says. You look at the screen and you see BETTER picture.

PS
Move the camera in RTW in the same zoom and angle as in KoH battle view and make a screenshot, maybe it will look better, show me.

[Lighthope]

Those screenshots looked pretty nice to me.

I just prefer KOH over R:TW because I don't like closed ended games and the demo for R:TW didnt' show me anything other than battle mode. (I also don't like the Roman era, so that was another minus. Maybe if they did Medieval:TW II...)

Lighthope

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[Sheriff05]

IGN flat out ****s, it always has, it has zero credibility among serious PC gamers.
It's fanbase and target audience are the same people the prevent KoH from being released in US.
(i.e lazy console gamers who assume anything that ins't 3D ****s and if the cheats codes aren't in the manual the games "too hard")
No one with an interest in Knights of Honor is going to *looking* for what IGN thinks about the game as basis for buying it. In fact if IGN scored the game a *9.9* I'd think there was something wrong with it, or assume they had just gotten paid off with advertising dollars.