Kingdom II: Shadoan Review ★☆☆☆☆
Kingdom II: Shadoan, takes you back to the insert disc 2 days.
Travel across distant lands, encounter friends and strangers, and gather magical items to aid you in your battle against Torlok the Twisted to restore Freedom to the Five Kingdoms.
- Gameplay: Travel via your map to different areas and use items required for scenes
- Visual presentation: Kind of feels like 80s animation
- Player discretion:
- If you opt in for subtitles, the game takes longer to play because it waits for the subtitles to finish
- There are timed events
- Accessibility:
- Subtitles
Pros:
- Journal for note-keeping
- Old school feel
Cons:
- Script is hard to read
- Game waits on subtitles
- You can lose your scrolls
- Four lives
- I DNFed
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Explanation to Negative Feedback
Script is hard to read
Oof, when you go into the journal that has all the information regarding characters and locations, the script is set into that style that you’d see in books written back in the days of old. Very fantasy-like. Very difficult to read at times.
I sometimes couldn’t figure out the names of people.
Game waits on subtitles
If you have the subtitles on, then when the character speaks, they’re going to scroll across the bottom. Well, you have to wait until the subtitles are done scrolling in order for the game to continue.
And the text goes by slow enough for you to be able to read it, so you might be waiting a while.
You can lose your scrolls
I hate this.
Especially since you need one of these scrolls at a later point in the game. There’s no way to get it back once it’s gone, and while it states to hold on to your scrolls in the in-game book that provides information to you, half the people aren’t going to know there’s something of a tutorial as part of the main screen.
Meaning if you use a scroll, and it doesn’t do anything, you’ll want to load at a point where you haven’t wasted using it.
So…save.
Four lives
You don’t have a health bar. Your lives are indicated by the roses on the right side of the screen. Why roses? I have no idea. Doesn’t really fit with the aesthetic of you being a wizard, honestly, but whatever.
The only way you’ll know the roses are your lives is if you read it in the in-game manual.
Or if you die and notice one of the roses turning black. I didn’t notice this before until after I got a game over from dying too many times.
It seemed like the game was just allowing death whenever it occurred, but no. That’s not the case. You have a limit. Don’t exceed it.
I DNFed
For those of you that don’t know, this means I did not finish.
This was not my choice, by the way. I was enjoying the game to a certain extent, despite the difficulty I was having figuring out where to go and what items to use–but that’s on me.
The reason I didn’t finish the game, is because I needed a certain scroll to progress. And once you use the scrolls a certain amount of times, they disappear permanently. Meaning I could no longer progress the game, because the devs decided not to implement a second option of getting around that flaw.
Instead, we’re forced to reload to where we do have the scroll still–which none of my saves took me to that moment–or restart the game.
A terrible flaw, if you ask me, considering all the times I’ve already backtracked to get to where I had to stop.
Explanation to Positive Feedback
Journal for note-keeping
I’m so used to games where when you have a journal, it self-updates at specific checkpoints in the game, and this is not a journal that does that. It’s for you to write notes in so you don’t forget things, but…I don’t really think this is a game where you truly need to keep notes.
It’s not a huge game with a lot of things to do at once, and it’s not like there are cryptic puzzles you need to figure out.
Everything is fairly straight-forward, you just need to make sure you have the right items to get past specific areas. Also, you can’t progress until you have certain items anyway, so keeping a journal for a small area of the game seems redundant.
Still, if you’re someone who needs or likes to keep track of things, here you go.
Old school feel
We’ve got 80s type of animation going on that are fully voice acted and can be skipped if you keep landing on them, but something else gamers aren’t used to these days is that it doesn’t exactly hold your hand.
I believe most of the tutorial you can find in the manual, but you’ll have to click on things on the screen in order to figure out what things do and find information on stuff.
And while there are clues in the game, with people telling you what to do in certain circumstances, it still doesn’t tell you where to go and how to get to that specific moment.
I don’t know.
To tell you the truth, I don’t remember a lot of games from way back when, but I do know you needed to save quite often or you’d get screwed over, and that you needed to find your way through to the end on your own.