For The King

I found this indie-looking turn-based RPG called For The King in my Steam library and thought to give it a go. After a failed campaign, I realized it might be better with friends, so I invited two along and did the next two campaigns with them. It was fun, but despite some variety, I really wouldn't go for a third campaign.

The game has about half a dozen campaigns in total. You pick one, pick three characters from a collection of around a dozen classes, which differ by passive abilities and starting stats, and then set out to complete whatever quest this particular campaign asks of you. Most of the game is just running around the map and fighting enemies, earning loot and levels to get stronger, and completing sub-quests until you get to beat the main objective. It takes about 8 hours per successful campaign playthrough if you're alone, and a bit longer if you're coordinating with friends.
The combat is a basic "your turn, choose your action, choose your target", and then you roll a bunch of d100 against your stats to determine the result, with the occasional consumable use thrown in. There's also an unlocks system to get more content - weapons, armor, events - after you've gathered in-game lore currency from campaigns, but it doesn't change the core of the game.

So the main thing I would want to talk about with this game is the illusion of all the choices it gives you. Equipment is not class-locked, but you will be highly inefficient if you use equipment not meant for your class, so it might as well be. Each of your party members gets their own turn on the overworld, so they could move separately, but with how tough enemies are, you almost always want to have a full party for each encounter, removing most of the point from splitting up the party. Similarly, everyone needs very tight cooperation in multiplayer to make things work, but since all actions are sequential, there won't be a better tactic than letting one person decide what everyone does.
At the end of they day, the game just gets repetitive. Once you get down the rhythm of combat, who to focus, how to optimally path around the map, and other small details, you just repeat it ad nauseam.
That said, it was quite fun to figure this stuff out for the first time. The first campaign, it was a mystery what various buildings did, how to approach certain enemies, and the variety in equipment actually seemed to be pretty large. I also found the difficulty to be excellently balanced, as well as the game hurrying you along at a moderate pace to stop you from going the unfun route of farming yourself too strong.

So, what do I think of the game overall? Despite the very low-quality appearance, For The King is quite well-made. It suffers mostly from sticking to a very standard turn-based RPG formula which many people are already familiar with, yet not quite providing enough depth to make it replayable for a longer amount of time without feeling like you're just doing the same thing over and over without much thought. In conclusion, it earns my recommendation and a (low) spot on my best games list, because I had fun for the first campaign or two, and could share the experience with friends.