Welcome to our review of King Lucas, a new game out on Nintendo Switch and it fell short of expectations.
After an incident King Lucas had with the Witch of Sausan, the Queen left him and remarried in an adjacent kingdom, and now his daughters are the only ones left at his side. Due to his love for them, each and every time they get lost in the castle, he moves heaven and earth to get them back and he only resorts to the most intrepid knights in order to find them. Will you be one of those knights?
Play for the favor of King Lucas and the three princesses’ love. A castle will be randomly built and you must find them inside a little area of it. You can move horizontally and vertically through the rooms until you reach your goal. Once you succeed, the castle will become a little bit more difficult: a larger area will be unlocked… and the experience will become more hardcore when the princess becomes lost inside a fully unlocked castle with more than 1,000 rooms.
King Lucas is a rather boring attempt at the platforming genre. The entire game fell short of my expectations, though in all fairness, they were quite high. Averaging a 7.8 score on Metacritic for the PC version, I was getting my hopes up that I’d finally find a decent enough platformer again, which has been quite hard to do ever since playing Sydney Hunter. That game set the bar very high and I had my hopes up.
Sadly King Lucas is quite the boring game. You move around in a patterned dungeon when looking at the map and everything is about as to be expected. Lava pits, spikes, instant deaths upon falling from a cliff, … The game is all about getting to the princesses. At first, I really enjoyed the killing of enemies and going for better weapons to achieve it, but as more as I played, the more I got bored.
I ended up purposely trying out stuff with the intent of at least prolonging the game and maybe finally getting into the game. I failed at staying alive more than once and I even purposely plunged to death from a balcony. That is when I noticed how painstakingly long it felt to reboot the game and get back into it. I just had enough and I quit the game in annoyance rather than anything else.
In conclusion, I failed to have fun and here we are. I always wish for all games to be fun experiences but this one clearly fell short in that aspect. I did like the graphics but as I always say, graphics do not make the game.
