Hello everyone and welcome back to Kralizec Gaming. Today we are going to take a look at King's League II. This colorful strategy RPG is a sequel to the award-winning King's League and promises tactical battles that can be won with your wit. Whether it can deliver on these promises is the question we will try to answer today. King's League II is available on Steam for 13 Euros and 29 cents and through the Apple Arcade subscription service that costs 4.99 USD or your regional equivalent.

With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

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Video Review

Text Review

King's League II was a game that got me initially interested just because of its looks. Seriously. The game looks just marvelous. But sadly, the graphics are its best part. Nonetheless, let's move on to the review itself.

Gameplay

How should I put this? King's League II in insanely easy. Well.. easy may not even be the correct way of putting it. Simplistic. Yeah... that's the word that best describes King's League II – just plain simplistic. This is a game that a three-year-old could play and would very likely still succeed.

The gameplay is divided into three basic categories. The first one is managing your team. And it is repetitive. To an incredible degree. You get your team and train them while on the map. But, you do not put any effort into training the units. You just find which training suits the unit the best and then you just have them doing that training forever. The training process requires a single resource that you get a bunch of once per in-game month and even without maximizing your income of this resource you are more than likely just to not even spend it all on the five units you are going to use in battle. And there is no strategy involved. Just push the button and wait.
And wait you will. Waiting is the main part of being in camp. You push the train button and wait for the training to complete just to push the button again. How is this considered engaging gameplay? Yeah, the wait times are fairly low, it's not hours or even minutes, more like ten to fifteen seconds but still? When has waiting become the go-to mechanic in a game?

And it's not even like you can do anything while you are waiting because whenever you enter any window, for example, to shop around in the one shop that has boring linear upgrades the training is paused. Why? Just why?
On the RPG side of things, there are character level-ups and upgrades. Leveling up gives you stat boosts. That's all. No special abilities. Oh wait, I nearly forgot, every five levels the character gets a new title and a slightly cooler skin. But nothing in terms of actual progress in the characters' power outside of a slight stat upgrade. But I did mention upgrades. These can be acquired with crystals which are also the resource used to level-up the characters. The upgrades do give you a tiny little bit of choice on how you will build your team – more precisely two per tier – and are divided into four categories that correspond to the very basic classes (melee, ranged, magic, and stealth). But even here the differences are so minimal that they border on non-existent.
In terms of team management and character development, King's League doesn't have anything interesting to offer.

The second part is the so-called strategy part of the game. And again, it is so incredibly simplistic. There are a few villages around the map to which you can become the warden and they will send you some resources per month. To become the warden you just have to beat the current one. That's all. I'd expect that since you are the warden that occasionally there would be some kind of event that would require your action in some way to protect the villages. Or maybe someone else comes and challenges you so he can become the warden and you have to beat him to keep the village's resources. But no. That is not the case. Win one battle and the village is yours forever and completely forgotten. Just like the strategic side of the game was by the developers. Shame on them for even putting the strategy tag on this game.

And lastly, there are the battles themselves. And holy hell, did someone become lazy here. We were promised tactical battles where your wit would be used to win the battle. No. You just select your best characters, push the engage button and that's it. Seriously. Well, you do have the option to use abilities while in battle that once used take a bit of time to recharge. Or to be even more precise, you get the option to use one single ability per recharge cycle.

Why? Why can I use only one ability per recharge? This takes anything that would resemble tactics out of the window. You just use the most powerful damage ability or the healing ability depending on whether you need to do damage or heal. And ninety-nine percent of the time this means using the damage ability on the first recharge and for the rest of the battle (if it even lasts that long) just using the healing ability to make sure you do not have to spend time healing outside of the battle. Again I have to ask, how is this considered engaging gameplay? Watching five animated characters just doing their thing with close-to-none input from my side of things is just plain boring.

Story

I think I have complained about the gameplay enough for you guys to understand that I didn't enjoy it. So let's move on to the parts of the game I liked starting with the story.

The story of King's League II is decent. Nothing exceptional. Just the typical story that requires the main protagonist to understand that he cannot do everything on his own and needs partners to truly become the best. I gotta say that I think that the point is a bit too hammered into the players here but it isn't bad in any capacity. I especially liked the characters as they can be funny at times and that helps a lot to emphasize with them.

Graphics

By far the best part of King's League II is its graphics. They are just gorgeous. Seriously, if the amount of work that went into gameplay was equal to the amount of work that went into making the graphics King's League would be an instant classic. But sadly, I think the developers realized that graphics are what sells games as with the number of games available on the market nowadays, you need to catch someone's attention straight away and graphics is the easiest way to do that.

Music

Next, there is the music. Which is nice, but nothing special. You are likely to watch YouTube videos on the side while you are playing King's League II either way so I can't complain but I cannot praise it either.

Performance

What is probably most surprising to me is that I did have some performance problems while playing the game. While they were minor, just very occasional and very short freezes but its a super simple game and they just should not be there. Slightly disappointed here.

Conclusion

So… in conclusion: King's League II is gorgeous looking but in the end way too simplistic and sadly… boring game. There are close to no actual gameplay mechanics and the name of the one used most often is waiting. I cannot recommend it. If it was like a dollar or two, then I could consider recommending it but for the asking price of 13 Euros, it is just not there. If you already have the Apple Arcade subscription I would suggest you give it a try but certainly do not sign-up just to play King's League. It is not worth it.

So, that’s it for today guys. I hope you like the review and if you did, please consider upvoting the review and following my blog. And comment, if you have something you would like to add. See you guys later with more gaming content.

Disclaimer: All the images have been taken directly from the Steam game page