Kingsblood Reviews

The overworld, story telling and character managment is good. But the combat, animations, character design, and leveling up left much to be desired.

I just had a brief look at the game but as I see it, this is a little hidden gem. No bugs that i noticed, a nice evolving story in the first hour of gameplay and a nice autobattler filled with good item/base building/ skill progress. For me it is a YES Ich habe es bisher nur kurz angespielt aber was ich bisher gesehen habe reicht für eine Empfehlung. Hab bisher keine bugs gehabt, die Geschichte scheint sich prächtig dramatisch zu entwickeln. Solider autobattler angereichert mit nettem Fortschritt durch den Ausbau der eigenen Basis, den Talentbaum und eine gute Mischung aus Items . Kann ich so eigentlich blind empfehlen.

I'm only a few hours into the game, but so far this game is everything I wanted which was is a PVE auto-battler (like Riot's Teamfight Tactics but PVE only because I don't enjoy the TFT PVP meta chase). I'll report back later to comment on how strategic the auto battling system is, but so far it seems to have enough depth with multiple character traits to form teams around and an element weakness system to make placement on the combat board strategic. Overall I am having a ton of fun and look forward to experiencing more!

So far the game has been really engaging. There is a lot more to it than originally meets the eye. But the real winner here is the company itself, IcyForge. I ran into a problem where I couldnt load a save game file - any save game file, so I thought all my time spent playing the game was wasted. Those guys over there noticed that it was a coding issue, and within 12 hours had a patch sent out which not only fixed my game, but anyone else who might have experienced the problem moving forward. Top Notch customer service people!!! I wish many more companies took things as seriously as you do. Thanks again for solving my issue and for making a really awesome game!!

Neat idea but AI doesn't always path the way it shows, which can be devastating and frustrating. Leveling up is a bit weird but it does allow you some diversity. Home base could use some user-friendly adjustments but otherwise is pretty simple. I will admit, I was not invested in the story at all. Neat idea but I'm not convinced it's worth the full price. For that alone, I cannot recommend. Wait until a sale. It's too bad it does not give you a demo to try it out first (that I can see when I posted this review at least). *Hint hint devs* I do want to give the devs props though, they tried very hard to give this game some life. Each character seems to have a life of their own, paired with their own gimmick/trait/flaw personality. Although it's not my slice of cookie.... well done devs. You put more thought into your characters than some AAA games.

Couldn't really get into it, despite having "auto" in the genre there is way too much micromanagement involved for my taste. That said I can understand others enjoy it.

I'm completely defenceless against games like this. With zero budget and tons of passion. Couldn't care less about kinda ugly graphics, cliche (but earnest and in the end serviceable) fantasy story, funny amateurish voiceovers or some QoL imperfections when there's well designed fast paced autochess strategy with so much heart poured into it. Battles are brisk, yet very sensitive to tactics: from party composion (with many possible synergies) to clever positioning. Works like well-oiled machine and is an endless supply of fun. How much devs love their game is apparent in mind boggling attention to details, especially in writing - for example there is 50 possible recruitable companions and each has a backstory, some possible banter when in party with specific other fellas and each has own bloody outro piece of story. Like, how many people will ever read it? Tens? These devs just don't cut any corners, they try hard to do their best for something they love. And I love them for it.

I usually wait till I have played a game for a couple of days (not hours) before I post a positive review. However, I am so pleased that I found this game today and became so quickly consumed in the game loop that I wanted to share this ‘hidden gem’ of a game immediately. This is a mercenary exploration game, rpg story driven and semi auto combat scenarios. You can pause the auto combat to initiate certain consumable items and a major key to success in the combat is your placement of the team on the hex grid. Fans of combat synergy and holistic statuses will absolutely love this combat. One does not simply choose ‘my faves’ and steam roll through, combat here takes dilligence and pre-start planning. The story line and voice acting, artwork and overall atmosphere are superb, lots of work put into the atmosphere of the game. This game came out of nowhere for me and im so pleased to have found it. Looking at the steam discussions and discord I can see the dev team are still working hard at quickly thrashing out any bugs that may have occurred (i have had none) The game difficulty increments as you progress but you can drop it down a notch if it becomes to difficult… lets face it, we all love a challenge though eh?.. pro-tip: The rewards for completion of each quest battle increment as much as the hardness does so maybe stick with it? For me this game is more than worth the full price and an absolutely ‘must buy’ if its on a discount. Great game, really great product.

It's really average, but the concept is good, and you can get a few hours of fun out of it. I'm thumbs upping this because I think the concept is worth further exploration and I hope more devs are willing to experiment with near genre mashups like this. Basically, the beef I have is that it is advertised as Autochess + RPG. It sounds like a great combination; Autochess games feature strong progression, cool synergies, and a gradual build up over time as you build a better team comp. RPGs have a lot of overlap - you tend to get stronger over time as you progress through a story, learning new abilities and exploring a world. Except most of what I just said is only barely there in Kingsblood. The Autochess aspects of the game are the team composition and per-battle positioning to maximize efficiency, but lacks any kind of real meaningful progression; you can't get 2 star or 3 star units because they're static characters in the world. So yes, superficially, it's autochess, but it is missing the part that really gives autochess its depth. Similarly, the RPG aspects feels more like a Visual Novel pasted on an idler number-go-up game; there's a story progression that technically fulfills the "grimdark" part of the game (characters die in cutscenes but are otherwise immortal), and you can unlock nodes in the world in whatever order to explore, but there's not anything interesting about the character development either in the statistical or story aspects that I've seen. There's a few interesting story beats, sure, but the level ups are 100% +10 attack or +2 attack speed or +30 health; and they're scattered around in a tree so you can't even focus on building a character for purpose. I've never been more bored to level up. The devs realized this and have an auto-level system built in. Ah, but what about the combination part? Oh, teaming and such? Yeah, just more flat stat buffs. +12 armor or +10% damage or whatever from having x of a kind, every character is exactly 1 race, 1 class, and 1 element, so you can't even overstack. It feels like D&D 4th edition: balance is king, and the whole thing is one of the most curated, restricted experience ever. I love RPGs because they give me freedom in how I become powerful, but Kingsblood feels like it's on rails as far as progression goes. Sure, I can move around the world, but battles and new characters I unlock are entirely indistinguishable and exist only for their race/class/element combination. Sure they have some banter, but with the size of the cast, I couldn't really care less about any one of them. Probably the most interesting part is the part of the story that you're not involved with at all; one character is kidnapped early on in a flashback, and you get to see things from her perspective sometimes, and she is slowly being changed as she learns more about the reality - or at least the reality that the antagonists are feeding her; but that's all just presented as a simple visual novel with only talking head art. Anyway, it's not bad, certainly; it does a competent in-the-moment autochess, and the best team composition varies nicely based on the enemy type or location, keeping you from always having an alpha squad you use constantly, so you have to engage with the team building and positioning parts of the game, but it's a below average RPG. Still, if you like the team building and positioning minigames of autochess games, this could be a good pickup - and ultimately I think autochess + RPG could be a great combo if done with more focus on the actual progression aspects of one or both genres.

I feel bad to give this a negative review considering it's clearly a labor of love with nice art and good voice-acting, but the gameplay falls short. There's just too many moving parts -- 40+ characters, identical skill trees, word salad elemental rock-paper-scissor buffs/nerfs, forging weapons, crafting potions, going on quests, answering riddles, dialogue cut scenes, mercenary raids, tavern gossip, four kinds of currency, incrementally mediocre weapons/armor, stronghold upgrades -- and they ultimately mean next to nothing as you enter the battlefield. You spend the time min/maxing your inventory slots for battle, hover over the baddies to check their strengths/weakness, line up your heroes to optimize formations, then click "Go" ...only to watch your troops call an audible and just start attacking at random. Then you either win, or lose and get to start over. Rinse, repeat, the whole game. It just didn't feel rewarding. Too tough? Crank the difficulty settings down. Too easy? Well just keep plodding along until you hit a roadblock. Just a lot of tedious micromanagement with little payoff. Again, devs deserve credit for putting a lot of work into this, but if you were looking for rewarding gameplay, this doesn't scratch the itch.