The King is Watching Review

The King is Watching is a base defense game that tosses in a few twists and elements from other strategy game genres. Like many strategy games, you’ll need to gather basic resources to build structures which in turn give you access to new resource types that allow you to build more advanced structures. Resources are also used to recruit troops, at first just basic grunts but as you advance those new structures will allow you to add more advanced units to your army, at higher costs in resources of course. All of this takes place within the walls of your city, which is a collection of tiles arranged in a grid on the left side of the screen. You can choose what type of resource site or structure to place anywhere on that grid, selecting them from what is essentially a deck of tiles in your hand. The game’s unique mechanic, and the source of its title, is that the structures and sites placed on the grid do not all go into production simultaneously. You will have a cursor in different shapes of what look like Tetriminos – the shape of which is determined by the king you’ve selected to play as – and only the tiles appearing under the cursor will become active. All other tiles will remain dormant – your people will only work while they’re being watched. Their laziness exceeds their desire for self-preservation, I suppose.

The goal is to field an army and to replace its losses as quickly as possible because your city will face a steady pace of attack waves of invaders. If those invaders make their way from the right side of the screen to your city walls, they will begin hacking at them. Once your wall strength drains to zero, it’s game over, both for your city and for you. The game follows a steady rhythm of waves of lesser enemies that get replaced by stronger and stronger types as the game progress, with lesser and major bosses at regular intervals. The regular enemy waves come in sets of three and the game allows you to select which group of enemies will appear in each wave. You can even increase the challenge by adding additional enemies to a wave to reap more rewards should you survive it.

The rewards that come with surviving a wave are tied to the difficulty of the foes dispatched, but they will include some combination of currency, production tiles, artifacts, and spells. The currency is used to purchase more of the other types of rewards or building upgrades from a trader who periodically shows up. For the other items, you’re usually given a choice from two or three options, so, for example, you may get to decide if you want a lumber, gem, or swordsmen producing tile. Artifacts bestow permanent buffs and can affect anything from production rates to unit strength. Well, permanent in terms of the current run that is. Spells are one-time use, and while they are usually focused on damaging or debuffing attacking enemies, there are others that can affect production.

The game is fun to play at first as you learn to optimize your tile placements to maximize the synergy of tiles under the gaze, unlock new tiles, and discover new types of troops. You’ll be able to extend your runs to the first major boss relatively quickly, and then begin to focus on unlocking more tiles and troops. At that point the game quickly becomes a grind.

First of all, just reaching that first boss takes almost an hour of gameplay. After spending all of that time building an army and a resource stockpile, it’s disheartening to watch the boss shred through your army. You’ll then quickly drain through your resources while trying to recruit replacements that are quickly killed as they walk through your city gate one by one. At that point, there’s nothing you can do but watch the boss knock your wall’s strength to zero.

You’ll then begin to realize that the game needs a lot more work to achieve the necessary balance to make it less of a grind and to give you more of a fighting chance against the bosses. Since the resource tiles deplete, you can find yourself unable to produce a particular resource for several rounds and there’s nothing that you can do about it. And missing even a few seconds of active production can create a resource deficit that you’ll never be able to make up by the time the boss arrives. This means you’ll spend all of your time staring at the production tiles with your finger hovering over the pause button so that you can instantly switch in a new tile when the previous one goes to zero. This makes the runs even longer and you still may find yourself being shredded by the boss when it eventually arrives.

The advanced resources required for the advanced troops make the economy too complex for a system in which you can only run a handle of production sites at any given time. You’ll face more grinding in an attempt to unlock new spells or other buffs just to give you the chance to have the resource base required to field and maintain an army of advanced units.

Most people will probably enjoy the game at first, but the amount of time spent grinding and losing will quickly cause them to lose interest. This is a game for masochists and those willing to spend hours upon hours of their time running into a wall based on the slim hope that just one more run is needed to break through.