Naked_King Review

Naked_King wears nothing to hide its flaws

Wanted: hero. Position to be filled immediately. Must be capable of lifting a sword and a shield, as well as fighting untold numbers of monsters. Compensation: leftover clothing and a princess’s gratitude (no guarantee on the latter, though). If interested in taking on the job, please download a copy of Naked_King, the newest castle defense game on the iPhone.

The plot here is pretty weak: in the “Human Being Kingdom,” the princess’s wedding is on the ropes because monsters have stolen everybody’s clothing and captured most of the army. As a result, the king sends out the last soldier to rescue his comrades and reclaim the clothes. Instead of wishing the princess luck and setting off to enjoy the carefree, high-paying, lifestyle of a soldier of fortune, the knight trudges once more into battle.

This is standard castle defense stuff: there are two castles on every map, players start in the one on the left and are tasked with destroying the base on the right. In order to put together an army capable of winning a battle, players have to accumulate food so that soldiers (and eventually heroes) can be hired. Gold coins are also earned with each level, and can be used to upgrade the player castle, too; if players don’t want to wait there’s also the option to buy the coins from within the game.

For the most part, these missions are generally pretty easy. As long as players can hire enough farmers to harvest a lot of food, they can send out unending waves of soldiers to battle the monsters. Every now and then, players get a boss battle to break up the general tedium of the levels, but they don’t really make that big a difference in terms of gameplay experience.

Visually the game is fine, but it’s nothing special. The graphics are bright, cartoony, and rather vectorized, but they lack any real detail that will make them stand out. On top of that, there’s a major problem with the text wrap during dialogue moments: words often just cut off and continue on the next line. It’s disconcerting at first, but it becomes incredibly frustrating after the game progresses and the problem continues. Occasionally the English seems kind of broken at times, too.

Finally, there’s are some stability issues here, too. A few different times when the game was started up, it would show a lot of on-screen distortion and then crash.

There’s really no reason to purchase Naked_King. The game is generic and forgettable at best, and irritating and broken at worst. There are a lot of other castle defense games out there, and it’s safe to say that almost all of them are better than this one.

The good

The bad

30 out of 100

Mike Thompson

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Mike Thompson has worked each side of the video game industry, both reporting on and creating narrative content for games. In his free time, he gorges on pizza, referees for roller derby, and uploads ridiculous cat photos to the internet.