What kind of devs just go and change the gmae but don't think of rebalancing their quest mode ?

Literally half of the current game got broken by the latest update, so until it gets fixed I would recommend not purchasing the game. I'll change my review once they fix it, but it really saddens me to see a great game like that in this sorry of a state.

This is a neutral review, but given that Steam doesn't allow neutral, I've flopped positive.

There’s always something a little bit odd about playing a game that, fifteen minutes in, you recognise you do not like, but which you can nevertheless recognise is doing well at what it set out to do. This sensation becomes even more odd when the reasons why you don’t like are obvious, but they’re also the exact reasons your partner gushed over the game for weeks and insisted on sitting with you to “give you some pointers” even though you understand the game, but just don’t enjoy it.

Hi, Jeff. Sometimes, I do manage to make the numbers go brrrrrr.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3706284613

9 Kings is a roguelike with vague hints of deckbuilding, city building, tower defence, and puzzles thrown in, just for that bit of extra spice. You play as one of nine kings (get it?) defending your little settlement against the other kings for as long as possible. You do this by building structures, raising armies, and hoping your settlement scales faster than the enemies’ troops. Each year, players add a building to their settlement, upgrade their troops, then send them out to fight, repeating and repeating until either their settlement or their patience crashes.

Trying to slot 9 Kings into any particular genre feels like an exercise in futility. While it is a city builder (in that, at the end, you have something resembling a city), the actual placement of buildings and units in the 3x3 starting grid is a bit of a puzzle. Multiple scenarios, too, are better understood as puzzles needing one explicit solution rather than an opportunity to try a variety of approaches. This combination of roguelike elements and sneaky puzzle elements gives the game a fairly unique feeling.

At the same time, 9 Kings also manages to feel generic in a vaguely comfortable sort of way. While its particular combination of mechanics and elements is a new one, the overall principles of tower defence—which play heavily into how this game plays—are not. Indeed, that familiarity was part of what I found off-putting about the game. That it is so reminiscent of tower defence games and other defence-builders, while also not being a game in that genre, left a jarring feeling through every run, as if something was missing, even though I consciously knew that something I was missing was never meant to be there in the first place.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3706284899

This is, however, a positive review, largely because I recognise that, despite my own lack of fun with this game, it is very fun for people who are better able to accept it and enjoy it for what it is rather than what I’d rather it be. 9 Kings is, fundamentally, a game about figuring out how to break the game and the myriad of satisfying ways in which to do that. The essence of the challenge is to scale exponentially, and the game provides a wide variety of avenues to explore to do exactly that.

The game contains a freeform and scenario mode, with the scenario mode being more puzzle-esque, while the freeform mode is…freeform. It’s the freeform mode that provides the most opportunities for absolute shenanigans—such as having your troops annihilate all enemies within a second of having a battle start—though there is also something satisfying about the more puzzle-y elements of scenario play.

One of the game’s biggest weaknesses, however, is in the general opaqueness of its UI. While mousing over any given set of troops will show what upgrades they have, unless one is already familiar with all the icons in the game, it can be difficult to understand what those upgrades are doing or how they impact combat. Similarly, once in combat, the lack of feedback about anything other than troop losses and amount of damage being taken makes it difficult to figure out why a battle has gone in a particular direction. When my troops that had previously been massacring everything in under a second suddenly get thrashed in the next fight, an explanation would be helpful in figuring out how to salvage the run. The game, however, disagrees.

This lack of clarity creates a system that can be frustrating, but at the same time, makes it clear that frustration is allowed to be limited. Yes, it’s difficult to figure out what all of the enchantments on your warlocks are doing, but if they’re winning, that’s what matters. The specifics matter less than the scaling structure as a whole.

Which, again, can be deeply frustrating. Or it can be fun, if you’re someone other than me.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3706285209

Ultimately, 9 Kings is an interesting little scaling challenge game. It is easy to pick up, and easy to understand how to break, while not being easy as a whole. It’s satisfying to get into, particularly if these sorts of battlers are already a genre you enjoy. For my part, though, I was reminded of the games I wasn’t playing and the information I wasn’t getting, and left just a tad bit bored.

If you enjoyed this review, please check out the Summit Reviews curator page and website. [www.summitreviews.biz] Thanks for reading!

This game is a fun game with no bugs and well polished. At 50% discount its also relatively cheap and will give you quite a few hours of entertainment.

However, I do think there is something that needs urgent improvement in game mechanics. The issue in this game is that if you want to min/max you should only have 1 unit and buff that as much as you can.

The reason for this is simple: (1) buffs are % based, (2) each unit has a number of "population" representing 1 soldier of that type. Farms (support building) only give additional population to ONE adjacent unit, not to every adjacent unit. So its better to buff 1 unit with buffs and then scale the population of that 1 unit with farms so you end up with 1 god-like unit.

Once you realize this, the game becomes much more boring. I managed to win all difficulties by doing just this...

The game should force you to think, counteract the opponent (something I never even considered because there was no need), and use combination of tanks/dps/support to win by having those specific units be good at one thing but not the other. Tanks should be tanks and have a much harder time increasing its DPS, and the opposite for DPS units.

I will gladly change my review once this is fixed.