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Sound
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Value
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Graphics Although very well-rendered, and shown off to good advantage with a very intuitive and smooth camera interface, the graphics are correspondingly goofy.The game was created using the Torque game engine, and it seems that authoring tool lends itself to cartoonish and exaggerated imagery, a la “Think Tanks.” The landscapes are puffy and exaggerated, the buildings look like funny-animal versions of the buildings in Warcraft III, and the “troops” are rendered in an Asterix-like “Bigfoot” style. The icons and menus are also cartoonish, and the names of your opponents are pretty silly too, as in “Sir Cancellot.” Sound The sound and music are of a piece. When you move your cursor over a building, you get the expected trumpets and martial sounds if it’s your castle, farm animals if it’s a farm, and so on. The troops make aggressive football-hooligan sounds when they run between buildings. The music is martial and vaguely classical in style, although clearly done with synthesized instruments. All of the sounds are of a generally high quality—no Casiotone beeps here–and they add to the overall atmosphere of the game, but aren’t really exceptional in any way. Conclusion As a casual game, KingMania is pretty successful. The gameplay itself is enjoyable, and once you get past the first 8-10 screens you will begin to feel challenged, and the “hard” and “super-hard” screens are pretty engrossing. But once you’ve defeated the game (which I managed to do in 4 days of very sporadic play) there’s not a whole lot of reasons to go back to the game. There are only 30 battlefields, and although I’d say half of my total game time was devoted to winning the last eight battles, I do feel a bit short-changed, when I compare it to some casual games that offer 50 or more levels. KingMania does offer a multi-player option where you can connect over a LAN or the Internet, but really, the typical casual game is something you play while you should be doing something else on your computer, and isn’t necessarily something you go to the trouble of a LAN party for. If KingMania had taken a page or two from some of its more upscale RTS cousins, the replay value could have been increased enormously. Although I may be asking too much from a $19.95 game, having an “instant battle” or “random map” mode would make me much more likely to keep returning to it. And I hardly dare note that given its simplicity, I don’t see how having a map editor available for making your own battlefields would be all that difficult either. In reviewing a game, one of the primary methods for critiquing a game is to compare it to similar titles. It’s a bit tricky with KingMania, because as I’ve stated earlier, it sits somewhere between a casual arcade style-game and an RTS. It’s far too simple in terms of gameplay and detailed setting to be fairly compared to a big-league RTS, but on the other hand, it’s not one of those incredibly simple but horribly addictive casual games like Snood or Tetris. It IS fun while it lasts, though, and given the prices of most feature films or top-shelf game titles, you could do a lot worse with your entertainment dollar than KingMania. Pros • Fairly engrossing gameplay
• Some of the gameplay features of RTSs without the major time investment
• Humorous and engaging graphics coupled with smooth and easy camera interfaceCons • Too short, overall
• Inability to save game in mid-battle
• Not much replay value once you’ve finished the Campaign
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