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.