New 3D Fighter Kingdom Heroes: Arena Combines Wuxia with SoulCalibur

New fighters just continue popping up left and right, and the latest one is a surprise release from Chinese developers, not a scene we hear often about, both in terms of players and developers.

Kingdom Heroes: Arena is an upcoming 3D fighting game set in the Three Kingdoms period China and has an extensive focus on weapons-based combat. If that sounds similar to SoulCalibur, well, it actually isn't.

The closer look reveals that it is perhaps unintentionally archaic in its design, and not necessarily in a bad way. The simplicity of systems and loose way in which they connect with each other makes it feel closer to some of the early 3D fighting games, when the extra dimension was still new.

The obvious comparison here is to Dynasty Warriors from PS1, the first game in the franchise that was wildly different from all the other ones. Though it also has a Bushido Blade style weapon system where characters can pick their weapons and switch between two of them in a fight. Though it comes without the lethality of Bushido Blade.

On the surface, it seems like a fun little game, but there is an important caveat of AI usage, as you might have noticed by the thumbnails. The developers describe their AI usage as follows:

Our game does not use AI in gameplay, character behavior, or system design.
A small portion of the game's artwork was created using AI-assisted tools during the development process.
All other assets and content were manually created by our team.

There are a lot of extremely valid concerns about the use of AI in video games, and those reasons are only growing more valid over time, so you might want to skip this one.