You are a King, observing his domain from the comfortable cushion on your throne, wearing what seems to be a carton board crown. Your lands are magical, sparkling, and perhaps only worth strolling around if you have not yet wandered off into your teenage years.
Little King’s Story is a game developed by XSEED Games that was originally released on the Wii in 2009. Now, it has been given the HD remaster treatment and has been released via Steam. On Wii, the game was lauded for its gameplay, graphics, and overall cutesiness. Sadly, the PC port does not remotely come near the original game. A pity. Who doesn’t want to be king?
To start, I would like to express two major points of frustration, just to get it over with. This is a PC port, and thereby makes the same mistake all pure PC ports seem to make: controls that are simply ported from a controller to a keyboard. In that sense, Little King’s Story is 100% a PC port. No mouse control whatsoever. My second point of frustration: too many cutscenes (in the beginning) and an annoying delay between dialogue and actual gameplay. The game is also SLOW. Your character seems to always move as if the graphics driver can’t handle the visuals that need to be rendered on screen. Pretty weird for a game based on 2009 technology.
With that out of the way, let’s start by talking about the gameplay. In Little King’s Story, you play as a little king, or rather; you are a kid pretending to be a king. You have your own little island, your own cardboard box castle, and your very own minions working for you! You are also assisted by a group of trusty advisors that seem to be taken straight from a pre-teen anime series. Unsurprisingly, this game relies heavily on easy-access gameplay, simple humour, and a simple goal: expand your empire, get richer, and keep your loyal subjects happy. There’s nothing wrong with that, though. After all, Harvest Moon did the exact same thing, and I was addicted to that game when I was a kid. Stress on ‘when I was a kid’.
The gameplay can be divided into two phases: a building phase and an exploring phase. In the former, you order your subjects to follow you and build certain structures, or collect certain resources. In the latter, you go out into the unknown world in search of lost treasure, big mysteries, and (very cute and original) enemies. There are no loading screes between the two phases, but it is all about what you order your subjects to do next. Additionally, you can make a small group of them follow you around to gather things, dig for treasure, build structures, or attack an enemy. Easy as pie, and therefore sadly quickly repetitive. Even the ample puzzles are not much of a challenge.
To make the game a bit meatier, you have a variety of buildings to choose from. Almost all of them come with unique units, which you can train from simple villagers. There are farmers, gatherers, diggers, soldiers, and many more units which all have their own unique task. No wonder you often lose track of who is where doing what. What’s surprising is that all seem to have their own ideas, preferences, and history. A slight hint of an RPG? A nifty little gimmick, I say!
The entire game consists of constantly improving every aspect of your kingdom, and it feels as if you are constantly in ‘sandbox’ mode. Personally, I would have appreciated more plot-driven gameplay, with intrigues, traps, pitfalls, difficult to overcome natural disasters, angry mobs ready to bash your castle gate down and commit regicide, after which they turn your precious kingdom into a republic! But I digress, and this is, after all, a game focused primarily on a younger audience.
On to one final aspect of the game before I draw my conclusion: the game might be an HD remaster, but the graphics really seem outdated, and the resolution simply is not big enough for this game to call itself HD, although the developers seem to have tried to salvage what they could. In addition to that, the cutscenes that are fixed seem horribly old. Not even bright colours and a delightful little soundtrack can mask that. A shame, really. A proper remake could have secured another big hit.
Little King’s Story is a real-time strategy game that focuses on easy gameplay and a cute atmosphere to give the player the pleasure of constantly improving his/her kingdom. The variety of units, their own personalities, and the sometimes wacky situations all come together in a game that sometimes comes close to Harvest Moon or other settlers’ games. Sadly, because of the outdated original engine (2009), the game cannot call itself a true HD remaster, and it also seems to have the same problems as other, less-succesful, PC ports have had ever since there was a marketing boy who smelled easy money in the air.