The King is Watching was provided by tinyBuild for review. Thank you!
The King is Watching was one of my favorite demos during the Steam Next Fest, and it feels even sweeter to be playing the full game. I love how unique the real-time strategy game felt, and I was curious how the release would expand on the concept. Even after hours of playing, it never feels old, and I would say it's one of my favorite strategy games I have ever played.
The goal of the game is to defend your kingdom and its walls against an onslaught of enemies. To do this, we have to make buildings to get resources and manage them effectively to create an assortment of units to defend, while upgrading our troops, buildings, and our king himself. After overcoming wave after wave, we will get in-run rewards to help take on the increasing difficulty and, finally, take on the last boss and keep your kingdom alive.
However, the catch is that not all the buildings work constantly. We have a smaller grid to move around our larger kingdom, and only the buildings in that gaze-grid will actually make their respective resources and troops. It's a layer of gameplay I had never dealt with before in a strategy game, which is why it stuck out to me during the Next Fest demo. And I have to say, even after playing for hours and hours, it still feels enjoyable to play around with.
Having to constantly move the grid around and manage which resources we have and which we need, while also keeping myself supplied with the troops I need in the army I want, is addictive. The resources you can get are not only for troops, and will be used to create more complex buildings that can give multiple different resources, more complex items that can buff your army and increase your morale (which boosts attack power), or specialty structures that can give troop upgrades, new spells, and even repair your castle wall. Luckily, we can upgrade our troop limit and how big our gaze-grid is, but it will still be a lot of active management to get everything that's needed, and choosing the best spot to put your buildings to maximize efficiency.
On top of that, we have the option of taking an active role in combat. While the units will fight and target enemies on their own, we can get spells that will damage or debuff our foes or buff ourselves. These are all area-of-effect, so we will have to drag and drop them where we want to. These can greatly help turn the tide of some of the harder fights, but paired with the progression systems, can be very strategic to get the desired rewards to further enhance your kingdom.
The Kign is Watching's progression systems themselves feel very roguelike. As you play, you will get different items to enhance your run. Other than spells, you can get Artifacts for passive buffs, upgrades, and an assortment of new buildings. In the run, we actually get to pick and choose the waves of enemies we will face, which all give defined rewards. We can pick and choose what groups of enemies and rewards we will get, and even tackle extras to increase the rewards. After three waves, we will get a trader wave, so we can buy new artifacts, spells, upgrades, and buildings if desired.
It can look complex on the outside, but it all works together seamlessly to create an engrossing, unique strategic experience. There are so many moving parts and constant attention needed that keep me wonderfully occupied. There are those moments of slight calm as well, when you are just collecting and don't need to focus on anything else, but those tense moments of balancing where to put which buildings to get the resources and buffs needed have a wonderful charm to them that kept me coming back for more.
However, I wished for more ways to enhance my runs outside of combat. After each run, we get Denarii, a currency that can be used on one of the four upgrade/skill trees. These include buffs like extra Wine for higher morale and unlocking new buildings, advisors, and kings to play as. These are all very useful, with Advisors providing different enhancements, and each king has its perks. I found myself wanting more. There are challenges you can do to get more Ascension Crystals to unlock later upgrades and the different perks for each king. Still, outside of that, there's only a Gallery and Encyclopedia.
This doesn't mean the game isn't replayable either. Beating levels unlocks new Ascensions to get the crystals and extra Denarii, though I still found it a bit slow to get, and there are other locations. Paired with the enticing gameplay loop, I still found it hard to stay away. It may sound like I have a lot of gripes from the previous paragraph, but I would consider these minor issues from nitpicking. The King is Watching is a ton of fun, and it was hard to stay away and not enjoy everything it had to offer.
The King is Watching is not a game I was worried about playing on the Steam Deck performance-wise, but there was a surprising issue I found. It doesn't have any trouble hitting its 60 FPS cap, and there aren't any graphical settings to change either, so I am glad it just works.
However, it drains more battery than I would have expected for a game with these kinds of visuals. It tends to stick around 10W-11W battery drain, a little higher than I would usually expect, but it isn't outrageous either.
To fix this, we can put a 5W TDP limit with a GPU Clock Speed Frequency of 1000MHz. This stabilizes the framerate at 60 FPS while bringing down the battery drain to around 8.5W. This adds about an hour to an hour and a half of battery life, and while there is some slight instability at times, it isn't noticeable. Even with the framerate counter on, I didn't notice any slowdowns while playing, which is great.
The only other issue is the lack of controller support. It's still very easy to play with the trackpad, controlling the mouse cursor, and the default Keyboard + Mouse controller scheme can be used to nicely control the grid with the left joycon and rotate it with the B button. Even without proper controller support, it's still very playable.
The only options in-game are changing volume and whether the game is fullscreen or windowed.
The game doesn't support 16:10 resolutions or controllers, but it does have cloud saves. There are no HDR settings.
The King is Watching is a perfect blend of real-time strategy and roguelike. The unique gaze-grid allows you to pick and choose which buildings are actively working, and combined with the spells needed for combat, there's a lot to watch over in your own kingdom. The roguelike progression systems make each run feel different and require changing full-on strategies completely, while the upgrades, other kings, and advisors can really help make you feel upgraded when starting. I would have liked more ways to enhance our runs, and I found getting the upgrade currency to feel too slow, but it didn't stop me from having a blast.
It also runs extremely well on the Steam Deck. Even with the lack of controller support, it was still extremely fun and easy to control. There are a couple of tweaks we can make to increase the battery life, but even without these, it should last for hours and hours. This is a great game to play on the go, and it is easily my favorite real-time strategy game so far this year.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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The King is Watching has become my favorite real-time strategy game this year, and it's a joy to play on the Steam Deck, even without controller support.
