For The King (Early Access Game) Review

For The King is a challenging (read that as HARD) blend of Strategy, JRPG Combat, and Roguelike elements. Each play through is very unique with procedural maps, quests, and events.

Death comes easy, and it will come many many many times, get used to dying. It’s going to something you will do. Let me start off saying this game is CRAZY HARD. Like almost rage quitting inducing hard.

Graphics & Sound

The art of the game features a bright “Cartoony” flavor. The characters seem to come to life well, there are many and they’re both interesting and distinct. You can tell they spent a lot of time on the look and art of the game, and this shows well. Colors are bright and the game just drips with a whimsical feel, well until you die that is.

The music is wonderful, I really enjoyed there choice in music, I am a sucker for a good game soundtrack, and this one is not disappointing at all.

Game Play

The main “Quest Plot” involves the King’s recent assassination and the Queen’s attempts to discover the truth. So off you go to wherever she sends you along this questline, of course, there are plenty of side quests that you can do to get that sweet sweet loot, but beware! You will discover that the game is really a race against a force called Chaos. This increases with every passing day, adding skulls to a little Chaos meter above the map. They also seemed to pop up when party members dies. Each quest has a timer that, if it runs out, makes progress that much more difficult (the Chaos mechanic). Players must decide if they have enough time to go down into that cave to perhaps find loot and experience but risk elevating the danger inhibiting the ability to complete their main goals.

Random encounters give the players a chance to receive a boon or bane, often having to weigh the odds and consequences of failure against the often unknown benefits of taking such risks. But again, you have to watch that chaos timer, do you have enough time to do it? BAD things will happen when you get too many skulls on the chaos timer, After a few skulls were added to the map a “hangman” began to haunt my heroes, who became assaulted by surprise ghosts wherever they walked.

There is also a “focus” system. You can right click on any choice or attack to add a point of focus and increase the chance of succeeding. Each character has their own pool of these focus points and you can recharge them by sleeping in inns, setting up a camp, eating special herbs, or leveling up. And this is where one of my big complaints comes in, to me it seems as if the whole game hinges on this mechanic and quickly becomes a quest about using your focus points wisely, saving them for a critical moment. I like the fact this is there, and it’s up to when/how to use it, but it seems that you are FORCED to use way to often, to even have a chance to survive the onslaught you are about to partake in.

Another big complaint I have with this game is, the main quest is the same at every restart. The map is newly generated each time, yes, but the quest from the Queen always stays the same. After a few plays I found myself wanting to check out a new town I saw on the map, but I could not, because it was not on the list of things the queen wanted me to do, and I knew I would have no time to get there with out the chaos timer going into Defcon 1 mode.