Warrior Kings is an ambitious real-time strategy game.  It boasts a fully 3D environment, with rolling landscapes, and a high degree of camera freedom.  It also features large battles involving multitudes of troops, and sprawling medieval cities.  Ambition is all well and good, but it needs to be executed well in order to make a great game.  Does Warrior Kings succeed at this?  The answer is yes ... and no.

Warrior Kings is set in a medieval world with fantasy elements that add to the game without dominating it.  You play the role of Artos, a hero who watches helplessly as his father's lands are taken from him by a corrupt noble.  The campaign game follows the story of Artos as he tries to regain the lands that are rightfully his and purge the realm of the noble and his minions.  The world of Warrior Kings resembles a fanciful map of Europe, and each mission represents the conquest of one of the territories on the map.  You won't be able to select which territory to take next; the game's storyline will lead you through the missions sequentially.

Each mission begins with an in-game cinematic which establishes the setting for the mission and drives the game's storyline.  While a goal or set of goals is given to the player at the beginning of a mission, several new goals inevitably appear as the mission progresses.  The initial goals take some time to accomplish, even without the new objectives which unfold during play, so don't expect to play through a mission or two in a single session unless you can devote a nice block of time to your gameplay.  On the positive side, the long missions do mean that you'll get a good amount of play value out of the game's campaign.

The game's campaign also has some replay value built into it.  As Artos, at a certain point of the campaign you'll need to decide whether to follow the light or dark path, or to straddle them with a neutral posture.  Your decision will affect the units and upgrades available to you as the upper branches of the tech tree become accessible. 

Warrior Kings has many of the elements that are common to RTS games - resources which must be gathered by peasants, specialized structures to build units, and so on.  The game does put its own spin on a few of these things, though.  The resources gathered by peasants are brought back to their home village, but are not available for use at this point.  Wagons must collect the resources from the player's villages and bring them back to the player's manor or a central warehouse to make them available for use.  Wagons are vulnerable to attack and capture, so you'll need to be careful to protect your supply lines to keep the resources coming.

Another unique facet to the game is the size that your cities can reach.  You can really build some sprawling cities teeming with peasants going about their business.  The down side to this is that you'll actually be forced to build your main city up to a large size as the game does not allow you to build most structures away from your central manor.  While you can build villages just about anywhere to keep them near resources, and a few other structures can be built out in the wilderness as well, your unit producing structures will not enjoy this luxury. 

This causes some issues when trying to advance an army to the frontlines and maintaining a force in the field.  Rally points from the unit producing structures can not be placed too far out, since the units will be vulnerable as they wander one by one to the rally point.  If you face a military setback, it can take quite a bit of time to reassemble an army and bring it back to the front.

Unfortunately, discovering all of the intricacies of the game is made into a trial and error learning experience for the player.  The manual is woefully inadequate, and the tutorials that come with the game are really movies that you must sit back and watch.  There is no way to learn how to play without actually playing, a several of the game's aspects remain mysterious even after extended play.  For example, supply plays a role in the effectiveness of troops in combat.  The game even provides a supply wagon unit to keep your troops in supply.  However, just exactly how supply works, and its effect on units can only be guessed at, since unit supply isn't even mentioned in the game's manual.

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