There are never too many good cooperative RPGs, and discovering diamonds among the mountains of indie titles is not easy, but at this time of year, when the AAA releases are fading, the time of interesting indie projects begins, which I will say can be surprising. One of those close to this genre is For The King II, and today we will try to tell you what, how, and why it is worth attention and how to play it in general. This is our For the King II PC review.
What is For The King II and how to play it?
For The King II is a turn-based “tabletop” roguelite RPG for four friends who do not have the opportunity to gather in one place and play something more classic and truly tabletop, or simply for lovers of cooperative adventures. You can go through the title with a smaller team, or even alone, but the more people, the more fun, since a lot is tied to team interaction here.
What we have: a large playing field with hexes, on which you can move by throwing dice (the action is performed automatically, you won’t have to be distracted by it). There are a lot of interactive objects on this field: if your character steps on the corresponding hex, he rolls the die again and hopes that he does not roll a crit failure, which in some cases means the death of the unit, but more often – a battle, loss of health or even something pleasant.
On your way you may come across an old gallows, a witch’s hut, or the corpse of another traveler – there really are a lot of options. Once on the map, my friends met the remains of a brave warrior named Allestron – it was very funny when the skeleton rebelled and tried to kill them. In my party, we several times encountered an object called the “Smelly Toilet,” in which, with some chance, one could either find a useful item or come face to face with an interesting demon.
Some of the cells are occupied by monsters that can appear and disappear at the most inopportune moments. The entire map is dynamic: even if you notice that a “delicious” camp with a chest has spawned nearby, which will probably contain valuable loot, this does not at all mean that the squad will have time to reach it. At the beginning of the game, the world is hidden from you by the fog of war, and most of the hexes are a nightmare of a fan of the third “Witcher” who went to Skellige.
Opening the map is important. In addition to the constant battles in which you will be thoroughly beaten, the enemies here spare no one, you can find altars on it (they provide a useful boost and allow you to die once in battle without wasting the life of the squad), stone heroes (a lot of experience and restoration of resources!) and pools for fast travel. You will be grateful if, in the second and third acts, you quickly discover transport near key cities, since considerable distances will have to be covered.
The number of movement points will always depend not only on luck, but also on the characteristics of the character: if you have a lot of speed, then the hero will be able to move more quickly around the map, and if you sacrifice this parameter for the sake of protection, then please study the world around him very slowly and constantly be late for troubles with local monsters.
Moving around the map is one of the most important aspects of the game and requires careful attention. You’ll have to learn to calculate the distance to monster camps, random events and quest structures so as not to lose the most important game resource in For The King II – time.
You won’t be able to play For The King II like a classic RPG where you can explore every corner. You are always forced to find a compromise: the inner gamer will sincerely want to loot that chest near the city, but common sense will begin to tell you that with the number of wasted rounds, the chances of completing the game decrease.
It’s all about the mechanics of chaos: as the game progresses, darkness approaches the world, which brings trouble and destruction. If all the chaos cells (in each chapter they symbolize different misfortunes, but the essence is the same) are filled, your squad will die ingloriously without completing the mission. You can track the impact of chaos on the rounds bar, where the game will also show other impending troubles. Starting from the second chapter, powerful fel creatures will also appear on the map, imposing negative affixes: an evil leprechaun, for example, will have a chance to appropriate your loot wherever you get it.
It turns out that you can move through quests as quickly as possible and avoid the misfortunes associated with chaos and its minions. No matter how it is. Battles with ordinary monsters will give you much-needed experience, as well as artifacts, without which you will not be able to defeat the final bosses of the acts.
The map is divided into several biomes, and in each you will meet more and more equipped and pumped-up opponents. While it is still possible to fight a zero-level character with a first-level monster, a fighter in starting equipment has practically no chance against, for example, a third-level character. One confident AoE hit and your squad is sent back to the lobby. Don’t worry if you don’t manage to beat the game the first time: the authors of For The King II are not in vain claiming endless replayability, and roguelite is among the genres for a reason: it’s easy, but still a “roguelite.”
Everything in the world of For The King II will try to infuriate you, and your job is to have fun with it
Although For The King II has a “luck” parameter, it is quite situational and only affects rare events on the map. But the real luck of the players participating in the game is one of the most important “passive skills” for successfully completing the campaign. For The King II was designed to give you the joy of a random 10% chance of a critical hit, and the pain of a 97% chance of failing.
Entering the lobby, you choose a class, starting items from a very modest list, customize your appearance, and set off to explore the world of Farul. At first, you have only five available classes: blacksmith, scientist, hunter, shepherd, and herbalist. As you progress through the chapters of For The King II, other classes will open up. Each class has a set of characteristics: combat readiness, strength, vitality, intelligence, talent, speed, and luck. Armor and accessories in the game increase these parameters. The more of them, the higher the chance of striking with a weapon: each attacking artifact works from a certain stat, and by default, all classes have one main and one secondary parameter.
In principle, no one will stop you from taking a scientist who is best at handling weapons based on intelligence and talent and giving him a bow that requires high combat readiness. He will be able to shoot, he will just constantly miss. Yes, you can dress the same scientist in armor for a non-core characteristic and thereby increase it, but this, of course, does not make much sense.
On the other hand, the dice always calculate your chances of successfully using the ability, in the spirit of the joke about the probability of meeting a dinosaur on the street: it’s about 50/50 because you either meet it or you don’t. Break a glass artifact on the first hit with the main stats pumped to 95%?
The only way to effectively restore health in battle is to breathe in the vapors of the mysterious Firesilk. To do this, you will need the godbeard itself (12 gold at the beginning of the game on medium difficulty and infinitely expensive in the later stages, since with every week spent in the world the market is devoured by inflation). You are great if you take an herbalist into your squad – perhaps the only must-have class in any group due to the ability to heal several targets with one Firesilk. Try saying the word “Firesilk” out loud and remember this funny name: during the game, you will need to constantly ask to chip in on them. In every town. In every market. This game is a simulator for buying beards.
Consumables in this game do not lie dead weight in the inventory. You will have to defeat the inner storekeeper and press them constantly. Don’t hoard even the most “useless” medicinal herb like dancing nettle, which just gives you an extra action point. A store-bought pipe will help transform any medicinal roots into experience, health, or focus (local mana). The same goes for bombs with negative effects: don’t expect that they will be needed more on some super mega boss; in fact, every battle could be the last for your group.
In general, you need to play For The King II carefully: for example, in the open world you can dress up various artifacts found so that the character is more effective, and in battle you can make a more advantageous arrangement in accordance with the abilities of your opponents (you will begin to recognize them after a while, even differentiating skills monsters in arms in their dangerous clutches). You can “minmax” and carry different sets of armor with you so that you can change according to the required resists. However, this does not guarantee success: the cube will decide everything.
Indie graphics, indie engine, indie bugs…
The game For The King II was developed by a small Canadian studio IronOak Games. Above them is a slightly larger indie publisher Curve Games, but the fact that the game is not being worked on by a large team in the spirit of Blizzard or Riot Games is immediately clear. Some of the game animations are repetitive, like in ancient times, when Disney drew some characters and their movements according to a template for the sake of economy, the plot is predictable, and the graphics seem questionable to many people.
At release the game had a huge number of bugs. And I’m saying this, a person who doesn’t think that Cyberpunk 2077 had serious problems at launch, who didn’t encounter any critical problems or simply ignored them as an old-school gamer, ready for anything.
We must pay tribute to IronOak Games: they patched the game – fifteen hotfixes were released in the first five days. On the one hand, this indicates the release of a frankly crude product, which was noticed by users who “bombed” the reviews on Steam and dropped them to “mixed.” On the other hand, it signals that the developers don’t give a damn, and they were able to fix most of the network bugs very quickly. Perhaps the servers were simply not ready for such an influx of people wanting to explore the world of Farul: at its peak, the title attracted 28.5 thousand people. This is a very impressive result for an indie project! The well-known Diablo IV on Steam still boasts only 13 thousand peak online.
Finally, it is worth noting that For The King II is a sequel. It does not imply that all players will be familiar with the first part, but on my own behalf, I sincerely recommend that you familiarize yourself with it first. There are no fundamental differences between the games: battles have become more difficult, and quests have become longer, but the general vibe has not changed at all.
For the King II is now available on Steam.
Our review was completed thanks to a Steam key provided by PR.
