Posted December 21, 2021
Hero of the Kingdom III
Another casual game on the laptop. I must have been bored out of my skull, considering that I actually finished this. It was mildly addictive at first but later on I could only play it in shorter bursts because instead of everything getting better and falling into place, this becomes even more of a slow-paced grindfest the longer you play. In the end it was barely sufferable.
I had played the second game in the series a couple of years ago while I was traveling, and I thought enough time had passed for me to give the third one a try. Everything good that can be said about the Hero of the Kingdom series, I've already written down in my review of the second game back then. The third one was basically more of the same, except now the concept wasn't new to me anymore, and everything that is different in the third part is worse. It takes about twice as long to finish, but only because it does not respect your time.
The first flaw that I noticed, though that might have been just as bad in part 2 already: While the animations for each single action like harvesting resources are kind of cute at first, they become very tiring as soon as they pile up. I guess that's true for almost all games involving a lot of crafting, but it's all the more painful the more grindy a game gets. Worse though is that waiting for the animations to finish is not enough yet, you have to click on the same hotspot again, once it's done, in order to confirm and collect the end product. And you can't do it whenever you want do, the game won't let you click anywhere else until you've done so. It's the equivalent to a window notification you have to click away every time, and you can't just click anywhere on the screen to continue, you need to target that small window hotspot with the mouse again. Alternatively you can press SPACE, but that's still a lot of pressing keys in a game that should comfortably work with mouse controls alone, it doesn't really ease the frustration. It would have made more sense for a game like this to allow you to click on other stuff while animations for the first action are still playing out and then let you collect everything at your own leisure whenever you're ready, without halting the game for it. I do realize it's a casual clicking game and these things tend to waste your time in general, but it's just painfully obvious in this one how much time you spent just sitting there waiting for animations to finish and then clicking again in order to be able to take back control. A good "time waster" game, as insidious as that sounds, at least wouldn't have you notice how much of a time waster it is.
While it's enough work already to gather essential resources to keep yourself afloat, some NPCs actually task you to grind the same precious resources in higher number and give them up to them, for meagre rewards, and most of these quests are not optional but necessary to progress.
The most annoying mechanic though is the RNG factor which randomly causes your tools to break, and I had the suspicion that the chances of that to happen became ridiculously high later in the game. Every two or three fights I would have to grind not just for resources and potions in order to beat the next monster, but buy or smith an expensive weapon again, on top of it (and smithing has a random chance to fail, too, wasting your resources). All of that serves no other purpose than to increase the tedious busywork. You can't really optimize anything or prepare for all occasions, because while resources respawn, some of them don't respawn fast enough to balance this out, and in the end, it's all just more clicking and clicking, no processes are sped up later in the game, there are no tangible improvements because your skills have increased - they are just used as a gatekeeper for you to not get ahead too quickly. You are required to raise your skills by repeatedly performing the actions connected to them, so in order to get skilled enough to beat a tougher monster, you first need to beat a bunch of other, weaker monsters. But a lot of times you can't reliably tell whether fighting a monster that does not stand in your way will actually raise your fighting skill or not. Part of it might be random, another aspect could be how much of a challenge for you the monster is still considered, but the game gives no indication for any of it. Later in the game it's increasingly happening that you need to fight random monsters because raising your fighting skill is required to progress, but more often than not, fighting the monsters does not raise your skill anymore, and sometimes you don't even get any other rewards, you're just wasting your precious resources on a game of chance, which means more grinding afterwards. And the same is true for the monsters that drop resources for crafting poisonous potions. You will need poisonous potions quite often to fight certain monster types, much more often than poisonous creatures actually drop these resources. The balance is just off. I do seem to remember the second game was more like a puzzle of resource management, while this one is much more random and grindy.
The gameplay loop is basically "I can't progress here without X, so I need to collect stuff by clicking on the screen and watch animations, then craft X, and by the time I got what I needed, too many other resources were used up in the progress or things broke, and now I need to take care of that first, because I still can't progress despite having X now, since now I need Y - rinse and repeat", in the most aggravating way.
TL:DR
I thought this might be a mindless but relaxing game. It is mindless alright, but more exhausting than relaxing. Too casual to be captivating, too frustrating to help you wind down. Play it only if you hate yourself and don't value your time, otherwise be content with Hero of the Kingdom II, or pick games with actually enjoyable gameplay mechanics that don't just feel like doing chores on the computer.
Another casual game on the laptop. I must have been bored out of my skull, considering that I actually finished this. It was mildly addictive at first but later on I could only play it in shorter bursts because instead of everything getting better and falling into place, this becomes even more of a slow-paced grindfest the longer you play. In the end it was barely sufferable.
I had played the second game in the series a couple of years ago while I was traveling, and I thought enough time had passed for me to give the third one a try. Everything good that can be said about the Hero of the Kingdom series, I've already written down in my review of the second game back then. The third one was basically more of the same, except now the concept wasn't new to me anymore, and everything that is different in the third part is worse. It takes about twice as long to finish, but only because it does not respect your time.
The first flaw that I noticed, though that might have been just as bad in part 2 already: While the animations for each single action like harvesting resources are kind of cute at first, they become very tiring as soon as they pile up. I guess that's true for almost all games involving a lot of crafting, but it's all the more painful the more grindy a game gets. Worse though is that waiting for the animations to finish is not enough yet, you have to click on the same hotspot again, once it's done, in order to confirm and collect the end product. And you can't do it whenever you want do, the game won't let you click anywhere else until you've done so. It's the equivalent to a window notification you have to click away every time, and you can't just click anywhere on the screen to continue, you need to target that small window hotspot with the mouse again. Alternatively you can press SPACE, but that's still a lot of pressing keys in a game that should comfortably work with mouse controls alone, it doesn't really ease the frustration. It would have made more sense for a game like this to allow you to click on other stuff while animations for the first action are still playing out and then let you collect everything at your own leisure whenever you're ready, without halting the game for it. I do realize it's a casual clicking game and these things tend to waste your time in general, but it's just painfully obvious in this one how much time you spent just sitting there waiting for animations to finish and then clicking again in order to be able to take back control. A good "time waster" game, as insidious as that sounds, at least wouldn't have you notice how much of a time waster it is.
While it's enough work already to gather essential resources to keep yourself afloat, some NPCs actually task you to grind the same precious resources in higher number and give them up to them, for meagre rewards, and most of these quests are not optional but necessary to progress.
The most annoying mechanic though is the RNG factor which randomly causes your tools to break, and I had the suspicion that the chances of that to happen became ridiculously high later in the game. Every two or three fights I would have to grind not just for resources and potions in order to beat the next monster, but buy or smith an expensive weapon again, on top of it (and smithing has a random chance to fail, too, wasting your resources). All of that serves no other purpose than to increase the tedious busywork. You can't really optimize anything or prepare for all occasions, because while resources respawn, some of them don't respawn fast enough to balance this out, and in the end, it's all just more clicking and clicking, no processes are sped up later in the game, there are no tangible improvements because your skills have increased - they are just used as a gatekeeper for you to not get ahead too quickly. You are required to raise your skills by repeatedly performing the actions connected to them, so in order to get skilled enough to beat a tougher monster, you first need to beat a bunch of other, weaker monsters. But a lot of times you can't reliably tell whether fighting a monster that does not stand in your way will actually raise your fighting skill or not. Part of it might be random, another aspect could be how much of a challenge for you the monster is still considered, but the game gives no indication for any of it. Later in the game it's increasingly happening that you need to fight random monsters because raising your fighting skill is required to progress, but more often than not, fighting the monsters does not raise your skill anymore, and sometimes you don't even get any other rewards, you're just wasting your precious resources on a game of chance, which means more grinding afterwards. And the same is true for the monsters that drop resources for crafting poisonous potions. You will need poisonous potions quite often to fight certain monster types, much more often than poisonous creatures actually drop these resources. The balance is just off. I do seem to remember the second game was more like a puzzle of resource management, while this one is much more random and grindy.
The gameplay loop is basically "I can't progress here without X, so I need to collect stuff by clicking on the screen and watch animations, then craft X, and by the time I got what I needed, too many other resources were used up in the progress or things broke, and now I need to take care of that first, because I still can't progress despite having X now, since now I need Y - rinse and repeat", in the most aggravating way.
TL:DR
I thought this might be a mindless but relaxing game. It is mindless alright, but more exhausting than relaxing. Too casual to be captivating, too frustrating to help you wind down. Play it only if you hate yourself and don't value your time, otherwise be content with Hero of the Kingdom II, or pick games with actually enjoyable gameplay mechanics that don't just feel like doing chores on the computer.
Post edited December 21, 2021 by Leroux