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KingMania bills itself as a "quick action strategy game." What this means to the gamer is a casual war game with a hint of the deep levels of play found in major Real-Time Strategy titles. Sitting closer to the casual end of the game spectrum, KingMania is enjoyable without requiring complete immersion, and offers an intriguingly condensed battle experience.Sport of Kings The basic premise: On a series of 30 island battlegrounds, your castle is dueling your opponent’s castle. The duel takes the form of capturing and upgrading various neutral medieval structures—gold mines, farming villages, mage’s towers, additional castles, and scout buildings. You proceed to use those structures to create more troops and resources, with the goal of having enough forces to capture your enemy’s castle and eliminate any stray troops he may have lurking about. As you win battle after battle, the difficulty increases to “Ultra Hard” and there are some variations on the basic scenario. For example, in some battles, you start with two castles, in others you start with only a humble village in your possession and you must build up a mass of farmers to storm a castle. Your troops are either knights, which can only be produced at your castle, or farmers, which are produced in the villages. Additional offensive capabilities are offered in the form of spells, which are available as upgrades to your castles or mage towers. Resources are gathered at either gold mines or farming villages, and consist of (no surprise) gold or food. You use these resources to upgrade your structures by enhancing their troop production capabilities, resource-gathering capabilities, or the offensive/defensive capabilities of the troops or the structures themselves. You can get a rough idea of the number of your opponents’ troops in a given location by mousing over a building, but only by capturing scout towers will you gain access to the actual count. In short, it’s a very simplified real time strategy game (RTS from here on out). Just like all the $50 AAA titles out there, your goals are to make sure you have an adequate production flow of troops and resources, and that you are doing a good job of shuffling them around to your captured buildings so that you can stave off your opponent’s attacks. You must also keep building up your offensive capabilities, and ultimately attack your opponent’s “home base.” And again, just like the “big-gun” strategy games, winning can only come about by successfully balancing how you divide your resources between troop buildup (and between types of troops), defense, offensive upgrades and “secret weapons.” What brings it down to the casual-game level is the reduced scope of the battles. Each session or battle seems to last anywhere from 5-15 minutes, and to the best of my recollection no battlefield has more than a dozen structures to fight over. Because the structures and terrain are fixed, you won’t be building more buildings, and because the gameplay area is small, there’s no need to send scouts out to roll back “the fog of war.” In fact, given that the “troops” can only be moved from structure to structure, and do not engage each other outside of those structures, as far as actual game mechanics go, KingMania could have eliminated them entirely and had the buildings slug it out with ballistic weapons. As a nod to the “campaign” structure of more ambitious titles, the game does allow you to save a record of your progress across the larger map, but on the other hand it does not allow you to save in the middle of a battle. In that regard it partakes very much of the casual-game or arcade style of play. To the credit of the creators, they don’t try to make you think you’re playing Starcraft or Europa Universalis. In fact, the opening credits do a pretty good job of spoofing the sometimes unnecessarily elaborate storylines of the typical RTS. In brief: “Who cares why we’re fighting? We like to fight! OK, fine, let’s say it’s because you have more potatoes than I do. Fine. We’re fighting over potatoes.” The start of each battle features a humorous war-related “famous last words”-type quote from a fictional and clearly incompetent warrior of the past.
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