Don’t let the cutesy graphics put you off, Little King’s Story is deceptively deep and at times frustratingly challenging. There is nothing little about Little King’s Story.
Little King’s Story has a charming story with dark undertones. Your chief advisor, a knight who evokes Don Quixote, pushes you towards world domination. After a few days, a priest comes around and compels you to build a church. They both subversively discredit the astronomer who is investigating the cause of earthquakes that begin to shake the land. And it all begins with a little boy who stumbles across a magical crown while chasing some rats.
You begin the game with nothing. Your castle is a shed. Your character is helpless, but has the power of command. He can call his subjects to form a royal guard that follows him around the world to find treasure and fight enemies. At the beginning, you can only control five subjects, but that number grows to 30 as the game progresses. You grow your kingdom by constructing buildings, which allow you to train your citizens in different professions. These citizens do everything from you. Carpenters build bridges and stairs, soldiers fight enemies, lumberjacks and miners clear obstacles, farmers dig holes to find treasure. There are 18 classes.
As you conquer territories, you expand you kingdom, which proves an extremely addicting task. You finance this expansion by completing missions and treasure hunting.
Your minions’ inability to find a path to their objective without running into barriers is occasionally exasperating, as is precise targeting in situations with multiple enemies. This makes it difficult to strategically target enemies on the fly.
The map is another area that could be improved. It lacks detail and the ability to zoom in which creates a problem navigating the labyrinthine world. Even the main camera has little zoom control.
The enemy kings are not particularly evil or threatening, although they are formidable foes. They represent different philosophies or ways of life, the causes of numerous wars throughout history. You have the beatnik bacchant king who wants to drink and party all day. There is the Worrywart Kingdom whose ruler is a giant egg that constantly questions and second-guesses the meaning of life before deciding to hatch.
There are eight kings for you to usurp. In addition to eight major bosses, numerous guardian bosses must be defeated to expand your kingdom. Your subjects also provide a mountain of missions for you to complete.
The bosses have extraordinary attacks and can decimate your forces. Battles can be long as you slowly chew away an enemy’s health while protecting your soldiers from their attacks.
The penalty for failure can be tremendous, mostly because of the archaic save system, which is a constant source of frustration. There is no auto save, and you cannot save via the pause menu. You have to return to your throne in order to save your progress. The problem is expounded when the king’s low hit points are taken into account. It would be a miracle if you played through the game without losing several hours of progress after a cheap shot gives you the “life over” screen. This screen boots back to the main menu where you have to reload your last save.
Nevertheless, the frustration serves to sweeten your successes, and is largely outweighed by a minimalist story that mysteriously compels you to finish the game.
There is a lot to love in this game, and it will take a while to complete it–20 to 40 hours depending on your completionsist tendencies.
