Review: Queens Crown - Your Princess Is In Another Castle

Overview

Queen's Crown is a action RPG by Com2us, who has made other RPGs including the Inotia games. You play as a princess out for revenge against an evil villain threatening the kingdom.

Features

Queen's Crown features fast paced slash 'em up combat with many ways to strengthen your character, such as weapon skills and using gems. Also includes lots of quests to do and Game Center integration for achievements.

The Good

Queen's Crown at its most basic level is a pretty typical loot based action RPG. You kill things, take their gold and use it to buy new armour and weapons, to gain more levels and skills so you can kill more monsters, to get more money and so on, while playing though a linear story. QC's main quest revolves around an ancient crown and its fairy protectors. This was used in the past to seal away a great evil. Over time, humans forgot the legend of the crown and the fairies left the world, unhappy at the humans complacency. Now a new evil has arisen, as tends to happen in RPGs and humanity must call on them again. While QCs story isn't terrible, its far from a good one and features fairly dry dialogue and some slightly poor translation. Thankfully there are tons of sidequests. Just about everyone in the game has a quest for you, which run the well worn RPG gamut from killing off a certain number of creatures, to delivering a message, or retrieving a lost item. The game has a rather MMORPG like feel, as you spend almost all your time battling enemies and collecting items, rather than reading text or watching cutscenes. The titular princess is rather skilled in weapons for royalty and wields a sword, a spear, a bow and a hammer with equal fervor.

Each of these weapons handles quite differently. Your sword attacks quickly, while the spear has a longer range for example. Each weapon also has a special attack; the sword has a spinning attack, hitting everything around you and the spear lets you charge into enemies with a dash attack. You can also use magic which level up just like weapons, such as healing magic. You'll need every one of these skills, to stay alive in QC's world, as enemies are very numerous, and aggressive and as you kill the horrors, they constantly respawn. QC's combat is quite satisfying; you level up quite quickly and the constant action gives it that "just one more turn" quality, even if it remains a game that is best enjoyed in short bursts, due to its repetitive nature. Queen's Crown features an addictive character strengthening system. Besides the usual leveling system, where you distribute points between attributes, such as strength and vitality, you can also improve in weapon or magic skill which cause you to hit much harder with that weapon or spell. While this is a welcome addition, more weapon attacks would be nice, as a single special attack for each weapon type seems rather stingy. Another nice addition is the weapon customization system. As you play thought the

game, you can find gems with certain properties, such as poisoning enemies or raising your strength. You fit these into a "grid" which represents your total space for gems. Each gem takes up a certain amount of space on this grid, so you are limited in the amount of effects you can have at once. This feature is very useful allowing you to tailor your attack to the enemies you're fighting. Thus you can blind hard hitting enemies, or poison high hp monsters. QC looks quite good. While onscreen elements are a bit small and hard to see, the game has a nice, colorful, cartoony look with cute characters and enemies. Some rather nice magical effects add a bit of dash and environments look varied enough. Enemies are rarely thrilling to fight however, as you'll mainly encounter not so menacing tree stump monsters and slime blobs, that you've seen a hundred times before in RPGs.

The Bad

QC is rather repetitive. You spend most of the game just whacking stuff until it dies, which some people mind find boring quite quickly. Those used to grinding in MMORPGs, or who enjoy collecting loot and gaining power, without a story getting in the way should find it compelling however. QC's sound is poor. Combat sounds are almost non existent. You'll mostly hear the "whack" of your weapons striking home and the slightly different "whack" when monsters hit you. The rarely heard music also warrants a special mention, as it is some of the worst I have ever heard in an iOS game. Appalling 5 second long snippets, that repeat over and over is not a recipe for aural delight. For the sake of your ears, turn the music off! QC also includes IAPs, but they are for very minor things, such as a scroll to reduce the penalty if you die. The game is easy enough that you should hardly ever die, so this isn't much of a problem. Another one that relates to a optional dungeon, which isn't important either.

The Verdict

Queen's Crown is a decent RPG. It features a few interesting wrinkles, such as weapon skills and achievements to keep you playing and a long quest, with plenty of monster bashing action. If you enjoy fast paced, simple to play action RPGs QC is worth considering.