The Kindly King

The Kindly King was one of the entries for the IGMC (Indie Game Making Contest) for 2014. As one of the judges for the RPG portion of the competition it is my pleasure to share my thoughts on the game. This review will basically just be the notes I took cleaned up. It will be based on the competition version of the game, so certain aspects of the game may have been changed.

Presentation
Graphics were a mix of RTP and Mack tiles. Both fit together decently, though the style is a bit jarring in some areas. Mapping was standard, though there were some rather large maps that were a bit bland. There were a couple of passability issues, too. There were some odd issues as well - the sprite, when on the world map, was squished down which was weird. There was also a transparency issue with some graphics in one of the towns.

Music was a bit annoying. It was the base RTP, however, the creator had lowered the pitch and speed of all the songs so they were a lot more boring and drained the excitement a bit. It was quite distracting.

Sounds were default and fit but didn't really stand out.

Writing had quite a few grammatical errors and a few spelling issues. The story itself was a bit bland, though the concept had merit. Characterisation was quite bland too. The main character seemed lifeless as did the NPCs and other characters scattered around. The most lively character was a researcher.

Gameplay
Battles were skewed a bit to the challenging side, but still easy enough to get past. They were annoying, though, as there were a lot of them due to random encounters.

Battling was, frankly, very boring. Your only choices were attack, defend, item or run - you didn't get skills. This made a certain boss battle over-hard and annoying as all you could do was spam attack and hope you could heal the damage while doing enough to take her out. It took quite a while...

Items were gained through either being bought or crafted. You had to have obtained the recipes for them before you could craft, however, but once you did you could purchase or find ingredients to create said items. However, there was a bug...

One quest that was needed to finish the game required the creation of a cloak. When I tried to create said cloak, the script (and thus, game) crashed on me. Luckily I could purchase a cloak at one of the shops, but it was still an issue.

One other issue with item creation is that while you could have grinded for items, it was a lot easier to purchase them. The ones you could grind for only cost 2 gold per one, where-as the ones you had to purchase cost more. Now, this sounds okay however it was a lot cheaper to just purchase the items already created than to create them yourself. The XL Potion cost 80 gold to buy straight up, but all told cost the same price for just the necessary items (that's not adding in the 2 gold items... of which you needed 20 for each one). Frankly it was much cheaper to just purchase.

Healing items were pretty bad. The first tier healed 5% and the last tier healed 50%. There were 5 tiers altogether, to boot. They really didn't help at all in battle.

The goal of the game was to build up an old castle by doing quests in each town, thus getting people to join the castle.

Fun factor
I had fun collecting people, yes, but there were certain areas that were a bit annoying - the random encounters for example, and the cost of crafting things vs purchasing. The bug was also a bit annoying as it came out of nowhere and I hadn't saved for a while.

One battle - a boss battle - was quite tough but the lack of skills and terrible healing items made it less exciting than it could have been.

I gave the game a 32 out of 60 for the IGMC. On RMN I'm giving it 2.5 stars. It's average and if it weren't so fun collecting the characters (and if I weren't a sucker for that kinda thing) it probably would have rated about a 2. It does have promise, if polished up.