Death Crown

Review

On the main menu screen, along with Settings, Creators and Exit, you’ll find four game modes to choose from. These game modes are Campaign, Domination, Practice and Versus.  Campaign is where you’ll make your way through a map of the kingdom. All areas that are currently available to you are indicated with a black flag; selecting one of these areas will then detail the difficulty of that area. The difficulty of an area ranges from one to five skulls, with one skull being the easiest difficulty and five being the most difficult. After choosing an area you will then be able to choose whether to Attack or Retreat; selecting retreat will take you back to the world map. If you decide to attack, then you’ll find yourself on the battle screen.

To begin with when starting a new campaign, you’ll go through a tutorial to help explain how the game works. The battle screen is divided into hexagon tiles, and placed somewhere on the map is your base, which looks like a cathedral. Around your base are several hexagons which are covered in dots, giving it a look of it being shaded out. The shaded areas are the areas which are currently under your control. You’ll find the enemy base somewhere across the other side of the map and as you progress through the areas, you’ll find yourself up against more than one base.

In the bottom right corner are the three buildings which you can construct, these are the Mine, Towers and Graves. Also, in this corner is the Waypoint and any Gold your mine has produced. Each of the buildings has the amount of gold required to construct that building and the key binds above and below them. Mines will cost Thirty, Towers cost Twenty-Five and Graves cost Thirty-Five Gold.

After constructing a mine, it will produce five gold per cycle. The more mines you build, the less gold they will produce each cycle.  You can only build mines in your own territory, although be careful where you place them as once placed you will not be able to expand your territory past them. So, if you were to place a mine in between some mountain ranges on the map and it’s the only path towards your enemy, you will not be able to proceed.

Building Towers in the pathway of your enemy will allow you to shoot them every twelve seconds as they progress towards your base. Building Graves will produce your army every ten seconds; it’s a good idea to build your graves behind your towers in order to provide them with some protection from the advancing enemy. Once you have a Grave built you will then be able to set Waypoints for your skeleton army to follow. You do this by holding down and right clicking on the Grave and then dragging the cursor over to one of your enemy’s buildings and their base. This will then send your army to destroy your enemy, hopefully before they destroy yours.

As with the Mines you can only build within your own territory, although building Towers and Graves on the edge of your territory will expand it, unlike the Mines. On the battle map there are mountains placed around the maps which will block your paths, so you’ll have to make your way around them as you expand your territory.

Also on the map there are some black crystals; if you build either a tower or grave near them, they will then enhance your army. There are three black crystals on each map, and controlling all three of them may just give you that extra oomph in defeating your enemy.

The objective of the game is to destroy the pitiful humans’ base, before they destroy yours. Both the enemy’s base and yours start with five hearts, which are displayed in opposite top corners. After defeating an area, you will gain a black crystal, which you can use to upgrade any of the mines, towers or graves.  Making your first upgrade will cost one crystal, the next upgrade will require two, then three crystals, and so on to upgrade the buildings. Which buildings you upgrade will be up to you. Upgrading the mine will gain you more gold.  Towers will recharge faster, thus being able to destroy the enemy better, and the grave will spawn your skeleton army faster.

After each victory you’ll have your games stats revealed to you, which consist of time, time score, towers, mines and graves built and destroyed, gold score, progress multiplier and mission score.

Domination mode will have you playing level upon level, with the goal of progressing through as many as possible. With each new level you complete, the next will become increasingly harder. After completing a level you’ll gain a score on how well you’ve done, and your total score will then be entered onto the leaderboard. From here you can continue to play on, or you can save and exit to the main menu screen should you wish to take a break. There is also a practice mode so that you can hone your skills for the game in other modes.  Versus mode allows you to play against other folks; select to play as King and it will search for another player to play against.

In the Settings you’ll find the options for Pixel Perfect, Windowed, Night Mode On/Off (Open chest with skull is On, Chest is closed for Off). There is also Master, Music and Effects volume sliders, along with Language options of English, German, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Polish and Korean.

I haven’t played Versus mode yet, but the other game modes are quite fun. I hit a bit of a snag when trying to defeat one of the areas with a four-skull difficulty level. It can be a bit confusing when trying to follow everything on screen with everything in black on a white background. There is a night mode which swaps the white background to black and the black lines and icons to white. However, I found it a bit much on my eyes, so I turned the night mode off, reverting to the white background and black icons, lines etcetera.

The game is quite fun and it’s easy to learn, with only four buttons to build and lay waypoints. The graphics are decent and unusual, the sounds and music aren't bad either. It’s certainly an unusual strategy game and worth giving it a bash if you fancy something a bit different from the norm. There are more campaigns, missions, and other stuff in the works, planned over the coming fall and winter.

Review written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com!