An aspiring king at the mercy of circumstances. KingSim

A game about difficult decisions and their consequences. Good plot, resource management, mini-games. Spoiler-free review.

The game is announced for the Windows platform.

Available, good. Quite interestingly tells about the life of a pretender to the throne, and then a monarch.

The gameplay is a very complicated variation of the Reigns series with choices and their consequences.

First, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the short but very informative training that the advisor will provide. You can skip it later.

I’m torn by conflicting feelings about this game, there are simply excellent mechanics and things here, but they are tightly intertwined with what I didn’t like. Therefore, I propose to separate the flies from the cutlets and talk about what was done well, then about what was done poorly, and I’ll try to summarize it all.

I think many have played any game from the Reigns series, so here is its improved version, pumped up in terms of content.

We have as many as six types of resources: military, food, money, religion, people’s contentment and people’s health.

If we find ourselves at zero on some point, there will be (looking ahead – they will already be) serious problems.

As a rule, we need to make several fairly important decisions during the day. And this is interesting, since the choice is great and so is the number of situations.

There are several mini-games (if, of course, you can install them in the kingdom), which are interesting to participate in and you can do this once per game day – on each of the available ones.

I liked the events themselves. They are clearly made with soul and creativity. Either the inventor offers another outlandish machine, then some monster appears, then an unknown disease (I’m deliberately keeping silent about the most interesting, so as not to spoil it, please understand this).

Among other things, at a https://nongamstopcasinosites.co.uk/no-account-casinos/ certain point the game expands even more and you need to not only manage the kingdom, but also establish diplomatic relations with your neighbors, of whom there are quite a few and each of whom has interesting specific behavior.

NOW ABOUT THE SAD THINGS

I’ll start with the main thing, perhaps. The game is filled with content, but there is virtually no access to it. Why? But because with all the apparent wealth of choice, it is precisely this choice that the game deprives us of.

Let’s look at this using the example of the third day, which at first seems unrealistic to overcome. In short, they are coming to seriously beat us. And this threat can, in fact, be repelled only in the only way (I won’t spoil how) by making only the “right” decisions in key situations before. And then it will be like this:

In principle, I have already slightly revealed the next most serious problem of the game, namely, all the events that take place in it are strictly defined. That is, next time you play, you will find yourself in exactly the same situations that were in the last playthrough. Yes, you can change your choice in them, and this correlates with the above-mentioned drawback – you need to grope for this very “correct” choice through failure, otherwise the game will give you a “ha-ta”.

You can save the game and try to fix everything a little within a small range. But who told you that before (before saving) you did everything “correctly”? So you have to replay the same thing over and over again from the very beginning.

The third problem, in my opinion, is the almost complete absence of any gap for making “mistakes”. The slightest inaccuracy or failure and again loss looms on the horizon. And he will come not sometime there, letting you play, but literally on the next move, and very suddenly all this happens.

To be fair, there is, of course, some opportunity to flounder a little, but there are tiny changes and terrible randomness, plus this is a spoiler if you tell.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of the game and summarize.

+ Good music and sound.

+ The game really has a lot of content.

+ Interesting plot twists and events.

+ Good Russian text localization.

THINGS THAT CAN BE BOTH A PLUS AND A MINUS:

+- Super-minimalistic graphics that didn’t hurt my old-fag eyes. But I can also understand those who will feel.

– Lots of content, but virtually no access to it. In a recent update, more than a hundred new endings were announced, as I understand it – new possibilities for losing, which is no longer so joyful.

– Situations in the game are repeated according to a strict scenario, down to the smallest events. This is very frustrating during “new” playthroughs.

– There is almost no possibility of maneuvering resources in order to level out the problems that are constantly rolling in and at least try to play “your own game” and change something in what is happening.

– The reward for the mini-game at the sawmill is shocking. If you skip it, we get more profit (three gold versus two) than we managed to win by 84%, which, in my opinion, is strange. Although, perhaps, there is logic – you have to be a juggler to get through there and, apparently, the developers understood this. Plus, in a good way, this should be simplified; moving three objects at the same time along a constantly moving conveyor belt of five lines is somehow too cool, and even for such a meager reward.

CONCLUSIONS ARE SUBJECTIVE

When assessing, I am torn by strong contradictions, and therefore I write only subjective conclusions. I really respect other people’s work. Here it is and there is a lot of it. A content-rich project about elections and their consequences. There are interesting mechanics of mini-games and diplomacy, advanced resource management. But this power and the serious work done are wasted, because our destiny in this world is to find the “right path”, if of course we want to win and not constantly lose. As for me, it would be worth not tightening everything and everyone with the possibility of programmed failure (we get resources plus or minus crumbs – as much as we get) on almost every turn, but rather simplify everything and let the players play a little, albeit making “mistakes”, but with subsequent opportunities to correct them. And this game desperately needs random generation of events with each new playthrough, but I can’t imagine how to balance this in the current situation.

I’ll summarize my impressions: the game itself is interesting, but it’s as if it was put in shackles. Step left and right – execution on the spot, jump – attempt to fly away.

PS: I probably didn’t cover all the aspects, I might have missed something. I will be glad to add/correct the review or answer questions along the way in the comments.

PPPS: Particularly warm is the fact that this game is domestically produced, created by a tiny team of two people. We really need this kind of gamedev.