Hero of the Kingdom – Review (PC)

Hero of the Kingdom – Review (PC)

Cast your mind back to the world of yesteryear for a second.

 Dragons are roaming the skies. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in I’d look somewhere else

I often struggle how to start these reviews in all honesty, I worry whether I come off as overly positive, negative or worst of all neutral. I’m of the opinion that there is no perfect product, there will always be flaws or imperfections to even my favourite titles. While I have been quite harsh toward some titles, for example Nihilumbra, and overly generous to others, it is important to know that these pieces often reflect how the game makes me feel within the first few hours of play.

One uniting fact about all the other games I have reviewed, whether I have loved or hated them, was the existence of a failure state. To clarify, that is where the game ends either because of ineptitude, bad luck or that the game does not reach an ideal conclusion. In shooters, you could argue that dying could be considered as a failure state, while in strategy games it could be having your base destroyed. These are the most classic examples of a failure state.

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Hero of the Kingdom does not have a failure state, at least not one you can encounter without actively seeking it. The game is comprised of FarmVille-style point and click gathering and a fetch quests. The two are combined to give the player a real sense of the malaise of the title. The game does not present the player with any difficulty, besides the occasional scope of the map for the tiniest of objects. Beyond that, it keeps its players busy with a variety of tasks which all vaguely mirror one another. Almost all involve gathering the necessary supplies for a recipe using the aforementioned scoping, and simply clicking a check box. For this the player is rewarded with an animation on the otherwise static screen.

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Hero of the Kingdom has a bizarre, sedated pace to it that leaves the player mindlessly clicking on a selection of pop ups. All the while you have to suffer through a lighthearted whimsical ditty that casts you back to the developer’s concept of yesteryear. It just looks a little too pastoral for my liking and, as the only characters are farmers or fishermen so I didn’t feel connected to the world and its story. The game feels more like a cow-clicker than a journey through a piece of fiction.

While the hand-drawn backgrounds to each individual scene are pristine, it felt like there was not any clear design thrust to the game. Part of the game wants to be an RTS, part of it wants to be an RPG, another wants to be a puzzler and another wants to be a Facebook game. Generally, these heavily multi-genre titles just don’t work as they lack direction and Hero of the Kingdom is just another addition to a rather long list.

Maybe it is my personal bias, but a game that uses the word ‘Hero’ in its name, should probably contain some actual heroics. As far as I can tell, your character is supposed to be tracking some bandits that kidnapped his father and burned down his farmstead. There have been plenty of puzzling titles which have dealt with these kinds of situations with competency and have kept the tension going throughout the game. Instead, after thirty minutes of play, I was picking mushrooms for a herbalist. Maybe there’s some kind of underlying message of domestic heroism, but the game’s logo does have a sword and shield.

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I think my main issue with the title is that it clearly wants to be a Facebook game like FarmVille, Cafe City, Mafia Wars etc. Central pillars of the game have been designed around encouraging the player to continue playing via a reward system that closely mirrors the aforementioned titles. There is a strong undercurrent that the game may have (at one point) included microtransactions. The way the resource gathering system works, by slowly gathering materials and carefully scouring the map for them, you would half expect there to have been a shortcut written in to the game.

Pros:

  • Each scene is beautifully hand drawn.

Cons:

  • The game does not have anything close to a failure state.
  • Looks a little too much like plenty of the more popular Zynga games.
  • Doesn’t seem to have a clear direction to it.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5.

The game does not reward the player with anything overly exciting for progress, nor does it give them a gripping story. It simply exists; a time sink for fans of Farmville and its ilk. It is this lack of ambition which saddens me the most about Hero of the Kingdom, even more so when you consider the resurgence of the point-and-click genre as of late.

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