King Of The Castle – Review
Party games come in all shapes and sizes nowadays, but they often have a few elements in common. Games such as Overcooked!, Moving Out, or Catastronauts, often revolved around wacky fast-paced action that would set the stage for a lot of hectic and funny situations. This is what made King Of The Castle stand out to us, as it would also present players with a party game, albeit a political one. In King Of The Castle, players will do their best to knock you off your throne by voting on what happens to your kingdom. Even though we were constantly at risk of losing our fictional throne, we quite enjoyed this original take on the genre.
Story
The story here is actually quite simple, as you’re a monarch surrounded by scheming nobles who would love to disconnect your head from your shoulders in order to become the next ruler themselves. You’ll be tasked with securing an heir, and of course, subduing the nobles who are out to get you. Each playthrough does have a few different scenarios, but we already saw a lot of them overlapping during our second play session. That being said, the different situations you find yourself in are mainly a means of announcing the next voting round.
Graphics
In many ways, King Of The Castle is somewhat reminiscent of old-school Flash games, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In the game, you’ll always be presented with static images, which either show dialogues, some characters, menus, or the choices of the upcoming vote. Characters look as if they come out of a classic deck of cards, and the game does offer a few customization options for your monarch and the different regions of your kingdom.
Sound
The game does have background music, but we’ll be completely honest, as this game is best streamed to your friends or followers, the soundscape did take the backseat throughout all of our play sessions. The music isn’t too bad, but if you’re talking to friends via voice chat, you’ll probably turn the volume down so you can get into discussions with the nobles that are out to kick you off your throne.
Gameplay
King Of The Castle is a party game in which the owner of the game will have to play with people who join via a browser. Your goal is to stay alive and complete the goals you have chosen before any of the nobles can dethrone you and take over themselves. To play the game, you’ll either have to stream it to your friends so they actually know what is going on, or you can also work via Twitch integration. The players who play via the browser will use the said browser to vote.
The offset of the game is actually quite simple. You create a game as a monarch, and the other players simply join via a room code and merely have to type in their nickname. The game will always have three different regions under your control, and the other players will randomly join these regions as nobles. Each season in the game will show three different scenarios, and most of these scenarios end with the nobles having to vote on what happens. Your power as a ruler is quite limited, but you can still veto some voting options, or even spice things up with a reverse vote where the option with the least votes is placed in effect.
As mentioned before, the monarch has goals to achieve. This means that the monarch will have to crank up certain stats to come out victorious. In most cases, this means that you’ll have to raise your authority, stability, farming, trading, and so on. Depending on what the nobles vote, these stats increase or decrease. The nobles, however, will also have to do the same thing if they wish to come out on top. Nobles will have to complete three schemes in order to win the game, while the monarch will have to reach their goal as well to subdue the nobles. As the monarch does not have that much power, you can still exact laws, and one of the starting laws is a veto. This veto can make it harder for nobles to achieve their goals by removing one option from the possible voting options. Luckily this veto has a cooldown, making sure the nobles can still go through some voting rounds without the veto hanging over their heads. We did notice that some nobles have harder goals for their regions and with the voting rounds being somewhat random in what stats they can increase or decrease, some regions will have a harder time winning the game.
The flow of the game is also quite amusing, as you’ll either see the different regions fight among themselves, preventing each other from reaching their scheme conditions, or they will gang up against the monarch, making sure they come out on top. As a monarch, there is very little you can do to persuade the nobles to vote a certain way, except for the aforementioned laws that can give the nobles an extra incentive or push in the right direction.
As we mainly played as the monarch ourselves, we appreciated the feedback from the other players. The players somewhat regretted the fact that they could not see what conversational options the monarch chose for the in-game dialogues. We understand that this does somewhat break the immersion. That being said, it’s luckily only a minor blemish on an otherwise almost spotless track record.
Conclusion
Even though King Of The Castle is not a game you’ll be playing for days on end, it’s a great game to play with friends or with your followers via Twitch. We very much enjoyed playing through the different scenarios, and it was quite amusing to see who would come out on top after a few seasons went by. We appreciated the customization options in the game, as it allowed us to make our kingdom somewhat unique. If you’re looking for a fun party game to play with your friends or followers, we can easily suggest checking this one out. At its current price point, the game is very much worth it.
King Of The Castle - Review,
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[…] King of the Castle is an atypical party game where you and up to 3000 other people get to play politics in the most silly of ways. Try to get on the throne (or get somebody else off it) with smart ploys, general tomfoolery, and the rising of a rebellion. The game is great and now can be even greater since it got a big free update. ‘Democracy Manifest’ adds over fifty new events to the game that will add to the stories you can tell. Other user-requested updates have been implemented, including changing the interface for better readability, additional schemes to run, and Premium Nobles (aka people who have bought the game will get a special status when joining a game somebody else is running). This should promise hours of extra gameplay for you to enjoy! […]