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Five new games that give you the royal treatment
In the words of Shakespeare, "it's good to be the king" (Richard II, Act VI, Scene 4). This bit of wisdom is particularly relevant given five new games that put you on the throne, ruling your own virtual kindgom: Ant Nation, Overlord II, Little King's Story, My Life as a Darklord, and Holy Invasion Etc., Etc., Etc. Who would win in a battle royal among them?
After the jump, five monarchies enter, one monarchy leaves.
First, a disclaimer. I've only played each game for a few hours, so don't take these as definitive reviews so much as off-the-cuff recommendations based on first impressions of trial runs. For all I know, kiddie king sim Little King's Story turns into a moving tale of family and friendship that reaffirms the strength of the human spirit and calls into question our preconceptions about honor, hope, and mortality. Like Beaches.
Second, I might be stretching the definition of "king" game. Ant Nation is actually a sort of puzzle RTS. My Life as a Darklord is a straight-up tower defense game. Both Little King's Story and Overlord II are Pikmin variations. But they all have some sort of kingly angle, more or less. Sort of. Well...just work with me, okay?
I've probably already tipped my hand that Little King's Story didn't really work for me. It's a clunkier version of Pikmin. As you play, you build up a town, which unlocks villagers you can pull into your retinue. The bulk of the gameplay is running around with a set of villagers and throwing them at different tasks. Many (most?) of these tasks are combat, which involves a bunch of your little dudes piling onto monsters while you consider at what point the attack animation means you should temporarily retreat your dudes. Strategy, don'tcha know?
If Little King's Story gets any more in-depth, it takes several hours. There's some sort of courting subgame that I presume culminates in marriage. But there's a lot of mucking around with villagers and the usual unlocking areas to fight more dudes and break down more obstacles to unlock more areas to hunt for more gold. It's too kiddified and quaint for there to be much of a sense of discovery. I found (and fought) mushrooms. So there's that.
I might have had more patience with it if the villager management wasn't so imprecise. There's no way to, say, select and command only your warriors. After playing Overlord II and the Wii-driven Pikmin remake, I have no patience for this messy man management. Also, there's way too much "oh, I should run back to town and get a carpenter" or "oh, I should run back to town and load up on warriors" or "oh, I should run back to town and grab a hunter".
The first Overlord was a rough-hewn but wonderfully inventive and mischievous variation on Pikmin, in which you worked your way through a sequence of puzzles with a squad of chittering gremlins. It had some problems, such as a sloppy game engine, labyrinthine level design, and frustrating puzzles. So here comes the sequel to fix those shortcomings! Right?
Wrong. Overlord II features a sloppy game engine, labyrinthine level design, and frustrating puzzles. But it's still got a lot of charm. Those gremlin guys are way cuter than anything you'll find in a Japanese game. I just wish the developers had sanded down those rough edges before launching into another game.
Like people in England, ants have queens. Ergo, this is a game about a monarchy. But the social structure of ants isn't really the issue here. Although the graphics all-too-creepily recreate the way ants swarm, there's nothing SimAnt about Ant Nation. It's more like a real time strategy game in which you mine gold (food) to increase the size of your army (ant colony) and then drag select them (suck them up with an eyedropper) to attack the enemy army (ladybugs, beetles, and spiders). It moves slowly enough that the developers had to drop in weird little missions, such as scouring the map to find teensy red ants. I still have a headache from those missions. But even with these inane distractions, Ant Nation gets repetitive quickly in its tiny corner of some backyard. At least SimAnt had the courage to go into the kitchen.
Particularly weird is Ant Nation's take on how you train an ant: torture. Your ants start at level one, but you need them to level up if you're going to beat the challenges that progress the game. Ant Nation embraces that Hemingway bit from A Farewell to Arms, in which the protagonist muses that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger (in fact, I believe he even muses this while watching ants swarm around a burning log!). You have to brutalize your ants within a millimeter of their lives to get them to ding up. If you're not careful, you'll kill them. Oops. Ants are a dime a dozen, though, so it's no big deal.
At first, I thought I was supposed to manually pinch each ant to do this. Select him with the A button on the Wii-mote, then press the B button. This clenching move starts killing the ant. Just before he dies, there's a brief moment where you can let loose of the buttons, leveling the ant up. Ding! Pinched to level two!
As you can imagine, this gets pretty tedious with a colony of a few hundred ants, each of which can reach level 99. But I later found out that's why you get various, uh, training tools such as shoes, mallets, and blow torches. Use these to brutalize the ants en masse. Ding! Stomped/burned/smashed to level three!
This follow-up to My Life as a King, a lite Final Fantasy-themed city builder, is nothing like that game. It is, instead, just a tower defense game. Quite a good one, to be sure. It's polished, accessible, and clever, based on upgradeable units and an elegant interplay of melee, ranged units, and magic. Instead of looking down at a map of a maze, you build a tower while attackers work their way up through the floors. This verticality - think of it as an inverted dungeon - is what mostly saves this from being just another tower defense game. But it's still just a tower defense game.
It's also a lot more forgiving than My Life as a King, which got to be pretty difficult. My Life as a Darklord lets you play at your own pace, earning money even when you lose. There are even some branching side missions as you work your way through the missions. And although Square Enix hopes you'll spend Wii Points buying all sorts of optional junk, I haven't felt like the game is gimped. The core game you get for ten bucks seems like as complete a tower defense game as you could hope for.
I don't even know where to begin, so I'm not going to. Suffice to say, this weird little game with a really long name (Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do To Deserve This?) in which you protect an evil overlord by making a dungeon happen around him is one of the most fascinating funky new things I've played in a long time. When it comes to managing a kingdom, this strange new game is more fascinating, satisfying, weird, and addciting than the other four games combined.
I'll have a full review tomorrow, because this game deserves it.
By Kirian at 1:15 PM ON 07/22/09
I'm going to defend LKS here, although if it's not your thing that's fine. May be spoilers ahead, but nothing story-wise only upgrade-wise. I honestly don't think, from your impressions, that you've played it long enough.
Villager management becomes much easier once you buy the podium, which should have been there earlier.
That allows you to call up specific groups of warriors or, once upgraded, choose specific citizens for your group. If you want to command them in battle, tap up on the d-pad until your warriors are at the top of the list (tapping up re-organises your troops by group). It's a poor, clunky solution but a solution nonetheless.
The solution to the second problem is just to take a mixed group, which is something you really should have been able to figure out for yourself. The game hints pretty strongly that you should.
By Kirian at 1:16 PM ON 07/22/09
I'm going to defend LKS here, although if it's not your thing that's fine. May be spoilers ahead, but nothing story-wise only upgrade-wise. I honestly don't think, from your impressions, that you've played it long enough.
Villager management becomes much easier once you buy the podium, which should have been there earlier.
That allows you to call up specific groups of warriors or, once upgraded, choose specific citizens for your group. If you want to command them in battle, tap up on the d-pad until your warriors are at the top of the list (tapping up re-organises your troops by group). It's a poor, clunky solution but a solution nonetheless.
The solution to the second problem is just to take a mixed group, which is something you really should have been able to figure out for yourself. The game hints pretty strongly that you should.
By Xemu at 2:52 PM ON 07/22/09
Loving Darklord a lot more than I thought I would. Starts out quite slow but gets challenging fast. Plus, totally playable with my 5 and 8 yr old boys who love it too.
I didn't even realize Badman was a strategy game at all... maybe have to give it a look.
Overlord II is disappointing for the opportunities missed with it but still a big step over the original IMO. The minimap alone is a necessary improvement...
By steve at 3:05 PM ON 07/22/09
What is a "sloppy game engine" supposed to mean?
By ks at 3:14 PM ON 07/22/09
Hi, I'd like to disagree with you about Little King's Story as well :) ***SPOILERS*** The podium that you purchase after you defeat cow bones will make managing your troops a lot easier. You don't have to run back to the castle to get more people; you can teleport back to it immediately by pausing and then pressing 2. You can then use the podium to call up whatever citizens you need. Cannons can be used to travel around the kingdom quickly. The strategy you described is fine for ordinary enemies, but the many of the sub-bosses and especially the main bosses (the other kings) do need different strategies. The king fights are all very varied and their cutscenes (like the drunk king) are far from kiddie. I actually found the cutscene before the TV Dinnah fight a bit unsettling. The main boss battles with cutscenes are on YouTube here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLIrn7WCzLo&feature=related There isn't a courting subgame for the little king, he just marries all the princesses that he rescues straight away and ends up with quite a harem. He is even asked if he can keep up with them! Because of this and other things like the threatening priest and his conflict with the scientist and things that your citizens say like "who cares if I don't have a job, I can still hook up and make babies" I wouldn't say that this game is kiddie (even if it looks it). I find the game totally charming and laugh-out-loud funny at times. Negative points: it's sometimes difficult to throw your troops in the right direction and the symbols in the bottom left corner are a bit too small.
Apologies if I'm rambling, but I was totally surprised by how much I enjoy this game. I'm about 25 hours in and haven't finished it yet.
By Tom Chick at 5:13 PM ON 07/22/09
Of course I've got the podium in LKS. You get that pretty quickly, although even that can be a hassle. Gather crowds and then try to wade through them and pick out the ones you want. Oops, I got a carpenter when I was trying to grab a farmer. Hey, you guards come back here, I need two more of you. Ack, I got a carefree adult somehow. Get out of here. Too bad I have to dismiss everyone when I only want to get rid of one of them. Oh, wait, I can only see the icons for the first four of my dudes, so let me reorder everyone to check who the other ones following me are. Okay, now I've got my farmers set up to dig but...oops, I missed the hole and now I have to call him back and he's in the back of the line.
I have no patience for an entire game of that.
By ks at 5:59 PM ON 07/22/09
You don't have to dismiss everyone to get rid of one of them. Just call up the citizen list from the podium, click the top of the column to get all the people with badges to the top of the list, then click on the name of the person you want to get rid of. You don't have to assemble and wade through a crowd to pick out the ones you want, as you can use the citizen list to pick citizens based on their occupation, health, and weapon. You can tell which citizens are following you by the hats that they wear or by calling up the game menu. I liked shuffling through my troops to get the ones I wanted to the top of the line (I got pretty quick at it), and the red circle over the hole or whatever else the citizen is aimed at highlights when pointed at correctly so the citizen is guaranteed to hit it. The gripe I had with aiming was that it was sometimes difficult to aim precisely at cracks or barrels, but fighting was fine (and fun, imo)
By Tom Chick at 6:03 PM ON 07/22/09
Let me know how that works out when you're not at the podium, ks. :)
The point remains: fussing with villagers in LKS is a hassle. That's cool if the hassle is worth it for some of you guys, but there wasn't enough "game" there for me to want to stay with it. And considering how well Pikmin and Overlord let you manage your followers, I consider myself spoiled by better interfaces.
By ks at 6:07 PM ON 07/22/09
Oh, one thing that was annoying at the beginning of the game was that the troops sometimes got stuck in corners or fell off ledges. A formation can be purchased later on that solves the problem, but that was definitely the worst part of exploration for the first few hours.
OK shutting up now.
By Kirian at 6:12 PM ON 07/22/09
I've had the game since EU release and finished it several weeks ago so I know that the entire game is not like that.
The second podium, got after you defeat the Onii man (which is perhaps the second or third storyline objective in the entire game, easily doable within a couple of hours!), allows you to choose which citizens are in your guard from a list of the entire lot of them. It should really have been in there from the start but are you really going to write off a game because it starts off a little fiddly? You're making something of a mountain out of a hill (not small enough to be a molehill).
The only problem you've mentioned that you have to deal with throughout the game is the ordering one, and that's one I'll happily admit. It's annoying that there is no better way to cycle through your troops.
Secondly, it's easy to aim at holes if you use the aiming line, like the game tells you to. It locks you to anything your citizens can attack/dig etc.
Your complaint about it being childish really sticks out. It has a childish facade but it is not a childish game at all. There's no courting minigame either- you marry princesses automatically, and your citizens can be married after spending a seemingly random but large amount of time together in a group.
By Kirian at 6:18 PM ON 07/22/09
Saying there's not enough 'game' in there is just plain wrong. I can tell you my final save clocked in with a large number of hours, and that every other critic who has written about LKS has praised it for being much deeper than it seems.
Fair enough point about management being impossible outside of the podium. It's not something that ever in any way bothered me but I can easily see how it might be.
It obviously did nothing for you, but I think you're missing out on one of the better Wii games. Almost as good as Overkill. Strokes for folks etc.
By ks at 6:37 PM ON 07/22/09
Kirian, I think the reason you can only organise your troops from the podium is because the king wouldn't leave his followers out in the middle of a dangerous area, or call up citizens who would then have to travel alone from Alpoko to wherever he was. I don't think that any citizens ever enter a dangerous area without him. Picking the right citizens before a journey is part of the strategy, and generally there was a bridge or cannon at the beginning/end of a new area so I could easily go back and forth to the castle for different citizens wanted to.
I'm *really* shutting up now :)
By Tom Chick at 9:01 PM ON 07/22/09
Kirian, I'm not writing off the game because it's "a little fiddly". I'm writing it off because I'm not really interested in playing what strikes me as a plodding Pikmin clone with a typically Japanese kiddie aesthetic. That it also has an annoying interface just reaffirms my decision. I'm glad to hear that you feel it gets "deep" before it ends, but that's a recurring problem for me whenever I try to get into these typically Japanese designs: the hours of hand-holding and slow gameplay. It's one of the reasons I personally prefer that Holy Invasion etc. game. It just throws you in the deep end.
Also, I'm well aware of the aiming line. If there's anything else from the manual or tutorial screens that you think I missed, please feel free to pass it along and I'll then point out that I already knew about it.
By Kirian at 9:45 PM ON 07/22/09
Tom, you're mentioning things I never had a problem with. That you're having such problems looks to me like you don't know of easier options. I apologise if you feel I'm being condescending but there's no need to be that way about it.
You're entitled to your opinion, of course. I just personally think you're writing it off for the wrong reasons, so you can feel free to ignore what I say.
By Tom Chick at 1:41 AM ON 07/23/09
I'm simply pointing out that I'm aware there's a pointer in the game. That's cool if you want to champion Little King's Story, but I assure you that I don't like it because I don't like it. Not because I don't know how to play it.
By cricket at 3:11 AM ON 07/23/09
nice games to see all here
By Stone at 3:40 AM ON 07/23/09
I absolutely love LKS. But I have to be on Tom’s side here. Almost all his points are things that have bothered me too. The throwing needed to be the pointer style of Pikmen. But that can be something for the sequel. The selecting of your troops is oke when you get the second podium, but why is it not there at the beginning of the game? And why do I have to dismiss all of the party, When I just want to dismiss one so I can pick-up a carefree to change into a farmer? Now I dismiss them al pick-up a carefree change him, and walk back to the castle to get de rest of the royal guard. The selecting the right villager in the field by the down d-pad works perfect for me, it work in pikmen and it works in LKS. You just need to push it more time because you have 6 or 7 different worker with you instead of 3 a 4 in pikmen. Like I said before I love this game, and if you unlike Tom digg Japanese shit you will love this game as well.
P.S. KS thanks for the tip on the get back to the castle by pausing and then pressing 2. This is not something that the game explains (well) and it will solve the biggest problem I and any review has with the game. The long walk back to the castle to save.
By Kirian at 7:51 AM ON 07/23/09
Tom, up until that last message you were throwing up mechanical problems that the game more or less solves itself. I could address your other complaints (and I have a list of my own problems) but it's not going to convert you, so I'll leave it in a hopefully friendly manner there.
By obonicus at 8:33 AM ON 07/23/09
Tom,
I have no thoughts on LKS, as I haven't played it, but I think that your oft-repeated claim that some game doesn't have 'enough game' for you seems functionally equivalent to you saying 'it's not fun'.
I personally don't have a problem with the 'fun' word to describe an experience, but as I recall, you do.
By Tom Chick at 9:10 AM ON 07/23/09
I'm not sure how you figure it's oft-repeated, but if you're ever confused by what I mean, I'm pretty easy to reach. Which references to something not "having enough game" were confusing to you, Obonicus? The only place I can remember really hitting that line is with Little Big Planet and I'm pretty sure that's a lot more clear than dismissing it as "not fun".
By ks at 9:59 AM ON 07/23/09
Stone, I was a little inaccurate about that. You can press + (to bring up the menu) and then 2 to teleport back to the castle. You'll see "2" and "jump back to castle" under the mini-map if you are outside the kingdom.
Tom, there are inaccuracies in your mini-review (selecting only warriors, courtship, defeating enemies) so I can see why Kieron and I thought that you hadn't played it enough. True, the game has its faults (and we mentioned some of them) but yours don't seem accurate to me. The game's world completely opens up after you defeat the first king (which I did in about 1.5 hours), you can then barrel straight through the game or do some of the many subquests. I didn't feel that there was too much handholding, but of course that's completely subjective.
As for the "typically Japanese kiddie aesthetic" this interview http://www.siliconera.com/2009/06/19/building-little-kings-story/ says that Russian oil painting animation was one of the things that inspired the game's style. A beautiful example that reminds me of the game is "Picher Plant" by Alexandre Petrov on this website http://www.pascalblais.com/index2.html (look under directors). There is a quick part of Petrov's "Whales" (on the same website) that is kinda like LKS's loading screen.
By Neuromancer at 11:32 AM ON 07/23/09
I look forward to the review of HIoPBoWDIDtDT. I liked the demo but it was balls hard.
By Tom Chick at 5:51 PM ON 07/23/09
I'm disappointed there are no Ant Nation defenders coming out of the woodwork.
By Neuromancer at 7:43 PM ON 07/23/09
I see what you did there.
By Margaret at 11:15 PM ON 08/18/09
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Margaret
Margaret:
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't kno...More »