Kingturn RPG Plus

It takes a lot for me to dislike a game in the first five minutes.

Graphical glitches, uninspired soundtracks, and long loading times can all be forgiven, but when a game has a strong female protagonist joke about breastfeeding vampire bats which are trying to feast on her blood, I start to wonder what the developers were thinking.

Unfortunately, this rumination continues through much of Kingturn RPG Plus, which could have been a solid strategy RPG in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics if only its developers had put a bit more thought into its mechanics and dialogue.

If you've played a single "tactics" title or have dabbled in the realm of Fire Emblem, youll have a good idea of what to expect from Kingturn RPG Plus.

You take control of an army of standard fantasy types (Warriors, Archers, Mages, and Paladins) and command them from a three-quarters top-down point of view.

This sort of command would normally be an easy affair, but the menus in Kingturn RPG Plus are nothing short of frustrating. After moving every unit, you must manually select "end turn", and it's all too easy to accidentally click on "wait" (which irrevocably ends your unit's turn) while navigating through the unit's list of available skills.

This can frequently lead to accidentally skipped turns, which the AI is all to eager to punish you on.

Tactical inferiority

Curiously, however, this is the one instance where the AI plays unintelligently. Enemy soldiers will frequently bypass your weaker units to attack ones farther away that pose no immediate risk to them.

In other words, if you have a character in critical health - don't worry too much, chances are good that the AI won't notice.

These gaffes in inputs and AI behaviour would be easy to overlook if Kingturn RPG Plus told an interesting story, but - unfortunately - the dialogue doesn't improve much from the breastfeeding bat example above.

Worse, you never really develop any attachment to the characters under you command, and this is partially due to Kingturn RPG Plus’s bizarre handling of death in battles.

Rather than confront players with 'permadeath' (a fixture of Fire Emblem titles) or K.O. a character until the end of a battle, a character lost in Kingturn will be ready to come back onto the battlefield in five turns or so.

This means there's never any real sense of jeopardy. Watching your heroic paladin get cut down by enemy soldiers feels like more of an inconvenience than a loss since you know she's just taking a breather and will be back on the battlefield after a bit of a lie down.

The best phrase to sum up Kingturn RPG Plus is, simply, 'quick and dirty'.

Kingturn offers a surprisingly rich assortment of items and classes to manage, and the level of customisation that each character can achieve is something that SRPG fans will really sink their teeth into.

It even succeeds in providing an adequate, if steep, level of challenge for strategy enthusiasts - although simply grinding away at most maps (and retaining any XP or gold earned) is usually enough to compensate for the difficulty.

Disappointingly, however, Kingturn never really approaches the sophistication or refinement of other tactics titles. Still, it might satisfy your desire to play a more involved strategy RPG for a short while.

There's a strong chance that diehard strategy RPG fans will enjoy Kingturn RPG Plus as it's not a bad game - it's just not a particularly good one.