For the King II Review (Listoric)
We've been playing 4 player online coop for 40+ hours now, game is fun, fights are quick and enemies are varied enough to make each encounter different enough. At least if you're a group of four. Weapons, skills and the overall gameloop feel solid, not perfect, but solid.
I've seen plenty of reviews complain about bugs though. Weeks ago we did have two different gamebreaking bugs, but luckily for us they both have been addressed in the latest patches. Beside some UI glitches, we haven't encountered anything else yet, so the game is probably in the best state right now.
So far, I can only recommend it. Gameplay is solid, love the writing, love the campaign structure in general, we died to the kraken yesterday on our way to the final fight. Good times overall.
Things I wish were better:
- UI - It's a mess. You get it after a while, but it's just as bad as it was in FTK1. To be fair, it's better in some areas and worse in others, so it evens out.
- Even though it's online multiplayer, some things feel like local hot seat. Basically you need to wait for someone else to finish sorting their inventory, until you can sort yours. If you want to send a mate some items and cash, and someone else has the same idea, you just can't do it at the same time, everything flashes and views reset, you have to do it one after the other. It's wild.
- Items found in a dungeon, or after a fight, can be passed on to the next in line. You have to wait until it is passed down to you and have it in your hands, to compare it to the stuff you have equipped at the moment. You can't just open your inventory and compare, or tell your mate "hey, that's better than my boots, I could use that", unless you memorized the stats on your item. Else three people click "pass", you get it handed down and see if it's better than your current boots, just to find out it's worse and you manually have to hand it back over. It's a wild system.
Those and other inconveniences aren't gamebreaking and you get used to it, but it feels as if they invented solutions for problems, that they came up with in the first place.
Still, it's a recommendation, at least if you're in a group. It's chill, you don't have to have any mechanical skills to play, it's easy to grasp and even though we failed the 5th campaign part three or four times already, we still want to finish it. So go get it.