Recent reviews by JamCow

King of the Castle is a game that really shines when you have a decent size group to play. The variety in events and the way the game balances King vs faction (vs faction vs faction) actually works pretty well, imo. It's about 2 hours in my experience to play thru a full game (you're not going to see everything in that 2 hours, btw), but the highlight for me is being able to continue a dynasty, where the decisions from the prior run do actually effect some of your future options.

It's cheap and good fun, but it's hard to get a group since it only starts to shine at 7 players. Less is possible (minimum 4) but personally it's the larger groups that create that chaos your reign needs.

At launch, this probably would have been an easy "Yes", but as the weeks go on it's harder and harder to recommend the game, even as I continue playing.

TLDR: They're obsessed with loot boxes and put them everywhere, even in the f2p gameplay making everything just feel horrible.

Good: As a free game, the general game mechanics are pretty solid. Lots of weapons to choose from, none of them are behind the cash shop, everything involving the actual gameplay is bought using in game currencies. Combat is decent, at least against mobs. There are lots of decent catch-up mechanics for those who can't devote a ton of time but still want to play thru the scenarios, which are supposed to average around 6 weeks. When you replay a scenario (and you will if you keep playing), there's options for "Simplified" that allows you to breeze thru content you've already done while still getting most of your rewards.

Bad: Servers are laggy. Like increasingly bad laggy. As the weeks go on thing just keep getting worse and worse. Much more frequent rubber banding, struggles to reload ammo, hits not registering in their big world events, it's painful. And they've just pushed a massive PVP scenario that is half Capture the Flag, half Territory hold that can require lots of people in an area and it just gets so bad. The cosmetic shop is OK, little overpriced but as a F2P game I'm normally one to forgive that as that's how they make money. But every few weeks they ALSO drop loot boxes, where they put the most sought after skins and essentially charge about $300 to obtain unless you get really lucky rolls, which was raised to almost $600 on the most recent one. They haven't released anything remotely comparable outside these boxes.

And now, in their most recent PVP Scenario that they're pushing HARD, since they won't have a new PVE Scenario ready for another month, they added cosmetics for the teams, but put them behind yet another loot box. You earn them at least, but they can pull from two different loot tables and you can only earn 3 of them in the scenario. It's clear they're attempting to use this scenario as something that gets replayed every few months, but nothing about it feels good, from the lag to the box you earn having the ability to give you a single healing item. If this is how they're going to dish out rewards for people playing their scenarios, it really makes me question wanting to continue as it feels horrible. It no longer feels like they're treating their customer base well and I'm disappointed. Especially with how optimistic I was at launch, even with all the other negative press around the game.

I'll slog thru this PVP event for as long as I can, but with no actual rewards worth looking forward to, I suspect this may be what kills my interest in the game.

Engaging and relatable.