King of Kings 3 review
King of Kings 3 review
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Genre: We take a look at Gamigo's free to play MMORPG title "King of Kings 3". You can watch the video review for a quick look and read it all in detail below.
King of Kings 3 video review
Rough start
I thought the days of fighting with a game to get it to work was over; it was a silly thing to presume and I never should have gotten my hopes up – things had been going so well. King of Kings 3 downloaded easily, it even managed to patch itself without any problem. It was only when I actually tried to log-in that I started to have issues. The server didn’t recognise my password and, even worse, it didn’t recognise ANY of my passwords. So here I was, trying to hack into my own account. I knew the password would be the same used for GolfStar, they’re published by the same group, but why I had no problems with that and lots of problems with King of Kings I’ve yet to work out. After trying several variations of my password, I got into my account using exactly the same password I’d used to get into it in the first place.
I’d tried changing passwords via the games site and from within the program with little luck so, as a note to people who are having this problem, just keep trying to work it out and you’ll work out alright.
Becoming a King of Kings
One of the major problems with this game, and a few of the minor problems spring from this as well, is that King of Kings 3 doesn’t do much to break away from the generic image we think of when envisioning the fantasy genre. This starts right from the get-go with the character creation system and pretty much runs constantly from there. The character you’ll create probably won’t inspire you with confidence in the game, and you’ll probably be thinking about heading back to your regular MMO in seconds. It’s not that King of Kings doesn’t offer anything worth playing for, and given that the game is only a couple of years old, I can’t really think of excuses as to why it would present itself in such a lacklustre way. King of Kings 3 could be the poster child for the range of repetitive MMORPGs on the market, although how you’d tell it apart from the others I don’t know.
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The World Around You
King of Kings 3 continues its generic MMO feel into the graphics department as well. The world looks like it could be from an early PS2 title, from developers who didn’t really know how to push the system to its limits. You’re left with a retro feel, despite the game not really being retro in and of it, and that’s an odd combination that never really gels. Characters look passable, but jaggy and you’ll find frame rates dropping if there are a lot of people on screen and, at times, there ARE a lot of people on screen. The music is standard for this sort of game, orchestral score that doesn’t really match what you’re seeing on screen, there’s nothing more inappropriate as handling boring quests when there’s epic music playing through the speakers. You feel you’re playing a game that’s dated terribly, although it would have felt the same way at release.
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Battling Spiders
Your first fight, unless you make the mistake of straying away from the quest path (which we’ll touch on later), will be with some woolly spiders. The battle system is very dry and mainly consists of you sitting and watching boring animations, things you’ve probably seen a million times before. It’s standard, it’s about what you’d expect, but you could say the same thing about every faucet of this game and with nothing to make it stand out, there won’t be anything to keep you playing. As you continue through the game, things get slightly more interesting, but the key word there is slightly: it’s unlikely that things are going to change dramatically if you find things dry from the get go.
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Completing Quests
Perhaps I could have looked past the dry gameplay, the not-burning-hot graphics and the lack of any out and out enjoyable features in the early parts of the game if I’d have been able to explore a little bit and gained experience that way. It’s not going to happen. Straying from the “allowed” portion of the game even slightly will result in you being absolutely wiped out by some laughably weak creature. Obviously, as you progress with the quests, this becomes less of a problem, but the quests manage to be, and I hate to use the word again, so generic that it’s anything but a joy to play. Kill monsters, collect objects, level up to level up further and wield bigger weapons, it’s like the point by point guide to building an MMORPG and King of Kings 3 suffers from following that point by point guide to the letter.
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Playing Online
There are features that I never got to try out that other reviewers have touted as what makes this game. Personally I think that getting to a key feature more than five hours into the game (and not making the first five hours good enough to make the wait worth it) basically makes anything else null and void, but for the sake of argument I will say that there’s a chance things get better. That would certainly explain why there are so many people in guilds and fighting monsters, but I didn’t feel the pacing was enough to make me want to get to that point. Perhaps playing with friends that you know is a must in this title, but that’s not a possibility for everyone or, considering the amount of spam and the lack of actual conversation in the chat box, even the majority of players.
King of Kings 3 review
The Conclusion
I look back on this King of Kings 3 review, and at my commentary in the video, and I feel that I might be being a little bit hard on King of Kings 3. It isn’t a bad game, not really. It does what it does capably and, with exception to the graphics, to a level that almost anybody looking for this type of MMO will be happy with. The problem comes when you factor in other MMORPGs, and I’m not even thinking of a specific one here, just ANY MMORPG. It does everything in a way that’s been done and improved up, even years before this came out. Even if the original version of the game (pre-translation) came out six or seven years ago, there were still other games doing things better and in more original ways. In short: why play this when you could play something better?
"Generic" it’s a word that I’ve used more than a few times in this review and - without the use of a thesaurus - I can’t imagine a more apt word to describe this game. It’s a fantasy game, nothing more. And that’s what the developers were going for and that’s exactly what the people who love this game are after. They won’t care that I didn’t much enjoy King of Kings, and if this is what you’re looking for, you won’t care what I think either. For the more general MMO player, steer clear – you really won’t gain anything in return for your valuable time.
