Unlock The King 2 Reviews

Not a bad sequel, the 3d board adds a bit of extra complexity. Only complaint is the undo is buggy, if you make a mistake on some levels you pretty much have to reset. Not the end of the world but could be better.

Love the new mechanics and structure that make you think way more than usual about every single move. The penultimate level is so so good. It's a pity the camera bugs out and the Undo button doesn't work as it's supposed to, but I don't think that that alone deserves a negative review.

Brain Teasing Chess puzzles. Clearing the path of pieces for the King to reach it's endpoint. Gets rather complicated in the later half. Bugs regards to 'rewind' position of King and Camera Rotations during some stages, which requires game restart. Decent and Playable.

Imagine it’s Black Friday again, and you’ve decided that you weren't covered in enough bootprints the first time around. When the clock strikes midnight and myriads of strangers produce an assortment of cutting utensils—some legal and some not so legal—you realize you goofed for the second year in a row, and it's past time to abort. You shove strangers in oddly specific directions, dodge descending blades, leap over toppled grandmas, and shimmy through paths so narrow they would make a spelunker fill their adult diaper. If that weren't bad enough, someone also turned on a gravity manipulator while firing off a portal gun. You now understand the gameplay concept of [b]Unlock the King 2[/b]. [b][u]The Good[/u][/b]: [list] [*]Get thrown into the first level with no explanation of how it works. [*]Picnic-time-in-space OST. Like the first game, it's deceptively relaxing. [*]A few new gimmicks are thrown into the mix: elevated blocks, rotated boards, portals, multiple faces, bridges, switches. [*]Full camera movement with the ability to zoom in and out. [*]Interaction and camera movement buttons are separate. [*]Once you unlock a path, the king does all the work for you. [/list] [b][u]The Neutral[/u][/b]: [list] [*]70 levels. [/list] [b][u]The Bad[/u][/b]: [list] [*]The level select is horizontal and you have to click through all of them. [/list] [b][u]Pro Tips[/u][/b]: [list] [*]A piece's movement is not affected by block elevation. If you want to move diagonally with a bishop to a space that is 3 blocks higher, you can as long as it's diagonal to your position. [*]Sometimes you need to block a king instead of letting him move as he pleases. [*]Don't overlook far-away blocks. [/list] [b]Minimol[/b] continues to make unique chess games that aren't too derivative and have interesting and challenging gameplay. For $1, this game is a steal, so I'll recommend you get all of their games.

[b][i]upd: What you can read below is my original review of the first version of this game. I was pretty upset with my first impression which didn't live up to my expectations, as you can see it. After I posted this review, the developers were fast to respond, and they fixed things I noted here, and I really, really appreciate it. I played this game to the completion and I must say that now it is a good example of a minimalistic puzzle. So feel free to try it and support the developers. Also, I want to thank Raphael, one of the devs, for the answer you can also read below. It means a lot for me, too.[/i][/b] ---Here is my original review--- I reviewed the first game literally some days ago and was waiting for this sequel to come out, since I was really interested in it. The first game was good and relaxing, but too simple to be a proper puzzle, as I mentioned in the previous review. This game was advertised with a three-dimensional board, and I thought that it would be interesting and challenging to be able to switch dimensions and actually think about your solutions. But it seems that the devs went in a completely wrong way when they thought about cranking up the difficulty. The very first issue I encountered with this game is a menu bug in the very first level. I play in window, but when I launched the game and went into the menu to switch to the window mode, clicking on any button did nothing, the only thing working was the mouse scroll, and it moved the field sideways. After I played several levels, the menu started to work properly and I understood that what mouse scroll did was switching between the not-yet-opened levels. Seriously, how you managed to get a BUG in a game which UI is so simple and minimalistic? OK, I went deeper into the game and also understood that 3D board actually does absolutely nothing new for the gameplay. What it actually does is bringing an unnecessary artificial difficulty which ruins the atmosphere and pace of the game. For some weird reason the camera movement is limited now to a 90 degrees sector in all three dimensions. You just cannot look at the board from different angles properly now. Grey cubes are blocking the field of view to the point that it becomes really hard to even see where you can move. And here it's now hard to even CLICK on a piece you want to move and then on a block you want to place this piece on! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1985667951 It's also hard to even distinguish between a bishop and a knight in this configuration. Making some cubes unreachable also makes them nothing but something placed here just to block the field of view as much as possible. Some cubes are being placed almost outside of the window. It. Is. Not. Funny. At. All. The trailer advertises portals as a new game mechanic which allow us to switch dimensions and travel between parts of the board. I'm ~30 levels deep in the game (it's 70 in total here) and they are nowhere to be found. [strike]If they will appear near the very end, I will certainly brand this as false advertisement.[/strike]Please read the update below. This sequel could have been a hundred times better just by using one simple, but great advantage given to us by the third dimension. It's moving between dimensions [b]just by moving the piece without any portals[/b]! Really, just construct a 3D board where you can move a chess piece from a vertical plane to a horizontal one just by making a regular chess move, and it will become a proper puzzle, if done properly. I think there are some games of this kind, well, their quality is another question. Or at least do something like what you did in Knight Swap (I'll review this game later, after completing it, and it will certainly be a thumbs up from me). But what was done here is a bad decision from my point of view. I'll complete this game before commenting as a curator, since it's my rule, but it will be a challenge... not for my brain, but my patience and my eyes. [b]upd: Fixed some typos here, now let's continue.[/b] Ooookay, I (almost) cleared this and now I'm commenting as a curator. I really want to give this game a positive review now, since in terms of game mechanic and being a puzzle this game fixed itself later on, and did it in a good way. The portals were introduced almost instantly after I continued to play it, and it was a very good addition, which is exactly what I wanted here. But the design flaws of the levels are the same ones I mentioned earlier. Beware: screenshots below could be considered spoilers, even if they do not show the exact solution, which is [b]very extensive[/b] for these levels. [olist] [*]The camera/rotation. It's limited to actually even more than 90 degrees in each direction, it's like 80 degrees horizontally and 65-70 vertically. And it's becoming a big problem, for example, here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1986445165 It's very hard to see and understand the position of several distant cubes crucial to the solution. It took me ~20 "trial and error" tries to just understand the relative position of a rook and a knight needed for the triggers. Not good. [*]The positioning of the game field. Some levels are in desperate need to be [b]centered[/b]. You can see some of the cubes and chess pieces on them in these levels only while zooming out as far as you can. They are outside of the window frame by default and... well, I already mentioned the problem with the camera. Not good. [*]This particular level also has the same problem with the camera and you can also look at the overlapping rook and a knight near the top of the screen: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1986444651 You can technically overlap three pieces in one place and then try to pinpoint the one you need to move. Not good. [*]The fourth one is not a problem per se, but a dubious behaviour of the king near the portals. As long as there is a portal open for the king to move, the king WILL move there no matter what even it is not leading to the goal. It's being used as a clever trap in several levels, but here it creates a sort of a problem: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1986445435 The way to the goal is completely open for the red king, and even the other portals are blocked so the king couldn't move here. But the king is not moving, because the mechanic of the portal only allows the piece to use the portal after [b]stepping[/b] on it, not from [b]standing[/b] on it. Technically, the king here could do a step sideways, then go back to the portal and to the goal, but it's not doing it and you cannot tell him to do it. There is no "undo" button (and even the replay button is hidden inside the menu for some reason) so this situation requires to replay the whole, VERY big level. Not good. [/olist] All of these problems are easily fixable and I will change my recommendation to the positive one after these will be fixed. But for now this will be an informational one, "as is". ----- If you are interested in other games I'm playing, check my [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/36682541-Lonely-Dev-Reviews/]Curator page[/url]. Maybe there will be something good for you.

This title tells us that it takes the puzzle logic of Unlock the King into three dimensions with 70 original puzzles. Now, I didn't cross-reference the original game, but the first few - those for learning the basic mechanic if one hasn't played the original - are likely the same, or as close as not to matter. Indeed, the first 20-odd puzzles are all so simplistic as to not be worth counting for those who have played the original. There are a further dozen mid-game puzzles where new mechanics are introduced which are likewise filler - one click to solve, no opportunity to get it wrong - puzzles. But there is further disappointment. A lot of the puzzles simply have their boards extruded, but they remain 2D. Yes, the piece is on a different level, but rotate the board to look down on it from above and it's no different than the original. (Side note disappointment, the rotation mechanism is limited by the Z axis and a hard floor; there isn't full freedom to look at the puzzle from every direction.) Of the 70 levels, 7 are flat-portal puzzles, introducing the portal mechanism; one is an absurdly simplistic portal onto another surface. In effect, of 70 , only 17 are real 3D unlock-the-king puzzles. Less than half of those are in any way challenging. A few are nicely tricky. But there is so much fluff in this game that it's hard to justify the price, even with it being so low.

It's more like thumbs in the middle. I don't want to say thumbs down because it's not awful. I thoroughly enjoyed the first game and looked forward to this one, but this is a significant disappointment. The 3D viewpoint doesn't work. It lost the charm of the first game in the process. I'm not going to get the third one since it's more 3D. I applaud them for trying something new, but "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Lovely graphics and challenging puzzles with new mechanics introduced throughout. The puzzles are difficult enough that you have to mull them over for a while but they're not so impossible that you have to look up solutions. Just perfect.

[h1] Terrible Readability [/h1] The first game was okay, but the developers tried to be too clever in this sequel by adding a third dimension. The baffling thing is, even on puzzles that are completely 2D in nature, puzzles that could have been done on a flat board, they add meaningless elevated platforms, or have the camera angle be so weird that it's like the board is resting on its side. Everything just looks like a mess. Can't be bothered to finish it. The only reason I'm not refunding it is because I got it in a bundle.

Adding different elevations and faces does not add to the fun or interest of the original game, only obscures everything and is just more frustrating. Towards the end it just makes the final levels so overly complicated that they aren't enjoyable at all. There are a few bugs as well, where pieces get glitch out when using undo or going through teleporters, and when starting a level being unable to rotate. The level select has also been changed to linear instead of a grid, so you have to clicklicklicklick all the way through the levels instead of just selecting the one you want. The reset and undo buttons are also in the pause menu, which is just a bit more work. Definitely not as good as the first one.