Imagine the grand, epic battles of the Lord of the Rings movies with all those orcs and warriors fighting each other, making death sound like a blacksmith hammering on a hot iron as two opposing armies parry and thrust for their lives. Now imagine that those battles suck!

THE STORY SO FAR
The story of Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes is way too involving and complex for a game of this nature. I never got to play the original, but apparently the story of this game serves as a prequel, side-story, and prologue if I understand it correctly. The story is that of a group of half Vampires who unite the Dark Elf kingdom, something about gathering the ogre and orc tribes together to form one mass army, and then using said army to send the continent of Bersia into a tailspin of war and violence.

You will play the campaign/story mode through interconnecting tales (think of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction to get an idea about how these paths will cross) as you pick from one of seven characters (though to be fair only three are initially available since you have to fully complete one of their quests before you can unlock the others since they are variants of higher difficulties). You've got three Human Alliance characters and four Dark Legion characters. These characters range from Walter (a man raging a religious war) to Ellen (a warrior with a secret) to Leinhart (one of those Vampires mentioned earlier). The characters are varied (some are slow or agile) and they all control differently (a combo chain for one character won't be available for another).

The story plays out before and after missions (even with cutscenes during the actual playing of the missions in some cases), but the sad part is that these before and after story moments are told through static images of settings with little boxes of text that play with voiceovers speaking over them. The cutscenes are nice and all have some unique framing moments if you look at them with a filmmaker's eye, so I'm stumped as to why these couldn't have been used throughout the entire game instead of making me read and listen to bad voiceovers when they could've been actually showing me the story. Also, sometimes the story will play out as you actually play the game. You could be simply moving from one location to the next, when all of a sudden you'll catch sight of something/someone and then some dialog you share between your generals will fill in some story info.

SINGLE PLAYER: GAMEPLAY
Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes is a hybrid (no, it doesn't run on electricity) that merges a real time strategy game with that of a hack and slash adventure ala Dynasty Warriors. Unlike Dynasty Warriors, where you can just run around slashing everything you see and not have to ever worry about strategy for a moment, KUF doesn't allow you that option. You can never simply run anywhere since you must manually click points on the map and watch as your units move to the desired locations. Controlling movement in Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes is a difficult chore that is annoying, frustrating, and any other term for pain in the butt you can think of.

The problem with KUF is that the gameplay happens on ground level with your troops right in front of your face, instead of playing on a map looking down as in typical RTS games like Warcraft. Warcraft makes it easy to manage your troops since you always have the best perspective to see the action and thus you are easily able to manage and take notes of situations arising so that they can be easily squashed should they become too much of a burden. With KUF, however, the camera is only ever focused directly on your troops, but then again that is only when your camera is actually functioning properly. If you are going to merge two games that don't go well together (I'm sure even peanut butter and chocolate struggled to find each other at first) you better at least give me a camera that can help ease some of the pain. If you choose the closest camera so that you can see the nice graphics, then there is a good chance that you will be stuck behind a tree at one point or either looking at the backside of the troop's feet. If you choose the further back camera, there is a good chance that your troops will simply move on and your camera will actually quit following them.

Yes, you can bring up a mini map that you can use to plan your strategies, but then again this doesn't work all the time either. On numerous occasions I'd see an enemy coming and I'd make it my first goal to send a troop unit to deal with them while I focused on dealing with another one myself; needless to say I got gangbanged by both units from two sides and I was left to die alone and afraid. I quickly cycled through my units to see what had happened to them (I especially despise whoever mapped the unit switches and the mini map toggle mode to the same stupid buttons) and found them standing in place, stuck in a loop, and pirouetting in place as if they were ballerinas at a recital. I yelled, screamed, and threw my controller to the ground in frustration. KUF has some of the worst controls I've ever experienced.

Another problem with moving your troops is that there is sometimes just too much going on at one time and you will be bombarded with more enemies than you know what to do with. It would've been nice during these moments if I could have paused the gameplay (heck, give me a Matrix slow-mo moment to ease the pain) and then just sat back and studied to plan the proper course of action. When you can't control the speed of the game, however, you are left to make snap decisions and quick-minded reflexes that will typically lead to your doom, but of course that is during those moments when your troops aren't acting like idiots and spinning around in place. Argh!

The fighting (thankfully!) is done pretty well, though even that isn't done right. You attack with the X and A buttons, with the Y button being a SP draining move and the white and black buttons calling for aide from the help of your commanders. The camera zooms in way too close during combat and the only reason I can think of is to show off the sheer baffling number of enemies that can be running around at one given moment. The close camera certainly doesn't help give you an advantage during combat since being so close means you are likely to be blindsided by an enemy running at you from off camera. You can also parry and enemy with the B button, but the timing for this maneuver is so sensitive that you are more likely to fail than succeed. I actually wished that the parry option wasn't available (throwing in an unwanted move to try and give your hack and slash game some depth never works) and instead two opponents attacking each other would cancel each other out and make your weapons bounce off each other.

The number of enemies on screen during combat