Three Crowns, One Ruler!
The King is Watching is a roguelite kingdom builder, developed by Hypnohead and published by tinyBuild. Now, you can build your kingdom with the help of three new rulers in the Crowns of History DLC.
In The King Is Watching you play as one of many historical and fictional rulers to defend your castle from continuous hordes of enemies. Create buildings to generate many different types of resources, which in turn allow you to recruit increasingly powerful units to your army. Unlike any other base building game I have played, The King is Watching has an area of influence known as the Gaze within your castle, and only those buildings under that gaze will produce their particular resource. Even your defensive buildings such as log throwers or poison towers will not work unless under the influence of your gaze, this adds an extra level of management along with finite resources. Your resource buildings will only produce 1000 times before you have to replace it with another, and then you will only have access to buildings you have chosen as rewards for defeating a wave of enemies, or bought from the market with the currency you can earn in place of buildings after a successful defence.
The good news is that you can increase the area that your gaze covers, as well as the amount of troops you can have on the field, by paying the resources cost for them. You can also move your buildings around which makes it easier to manage resource and army production, especially during a battle. If the enemy reduces the health of your walls to 0 the game is over. There are two main ways this will happen, boss battles being the most common reason (especially that damn dragon) which occur after the regular waves of enemies are defeated, or if your eyes are bigger than your army and you get greedy. Each battle is set up through a window of prophecy where you select the enemies you face during the three waves you must fight before the boss appears, and the rewards you will receive for defeating them. In each wave you have to select at least one enemy, but if you are feeling mighty you can select up to two more enemies per wave. While this increases the rewards you will receive, it also increases the danger of being overrun and defeated.
Players start off with only one ruler available to them, King Baldwin. You can unlock the others with the coins you are awarded for completing levels (known as threat levels), though you will also be awarded these coins if you are defeated, depending on how many in-game weeks that you managed to last While these coins are also used to buy new buildings and upgrades, it is the new rulers we are really interested in.
Players can now command their armies as Cleopatra, Tang Taizong or Xerxes, and each ruler brings their own unique abilities or units to the battlefield. These three are not readily available and will need to be unlocked just like the other rulers, but they are not as costly as some of the others and you can buy them quickly. Cleopatra was undoubtedly my favourite of the three, she brings the most new units with her in the form of sphinxes, Anubis warriors, servants of Sobek and eight more egyptian themed units. These units are a little more pricey than the standard warriors, which you still have access to, but they are powerful and well worth the cost. It was worth the cost for me just to be able to build a mythological Egyptian army and watch them slaughter the enemy. Many of Cleopatra’s units have effects that trigger when they die, such as explosive scarabs, and all units, friend and foe, will drop canopic jars upon death. These canopic jars are the fuel for Cleopatra’s abilities, the most useful of which is the ability to resurrect your fighters. Resurrected warriors will still trigger their effects upon their second death, allowing you to create a loop of death and rebirth.
Tang Taizong is the master of defence, he allows you to buy crossbow men to be stationed upon your walls without affecting the number of warriors you can produce for your army. Adding to a boost to the damage of offensive buildings that he grants depending on how high your morale is, and the fact that he starts with a brick factory that you can use to repair your walls, Tang Taizong is the perfect choice for those who prefer a ranged playstyle. Due to the ranged supremacy of this king, you can afford to be a little riskier with your enemy selections per wave. Certain bosses still prove to be a challenge (once again looking at that damn dragon) but infantry and monsters often lose a significant portion of their number before your warriors can even get to them.
Xerxes is the most difficult of the new rulers to play as. His armies are very fragile but in exchange their damage is increased dramatically, and increases further with training. While Xerxes abilities are not bad, they are poor compared to the other two rulers. Xerxes can grant temporary invincibility to his units and summon a unit of Immortals (as seen in the film 300), his final ability can reset all cooldown timers but these things do not help to keep your army alive. Playing as Xerxes you will constantly be replacing troops even though they may cut down the enemy more swiftly than with the other rulers, and boss battles sometimes feel impossible to win, especially on the higher threat levels. Xerxes also feels rather bland compared to Cleopatra’s themed units and abilities and Tang Taizong’s ranged playstyle. The last point that makes Xerxes the least enjoyable ruler to play as is his gaze. In this case size does indeed matter, his gaze will only cover two buildings to begin with which makes building your army even slower than usual, and for an army with a glass jaw that is not good news.
