Giveaway of the Day - Be a King 2

We had a record set last week with respect to the one of the highest number of downloads made over a 24 hr period since the game giveaway project started for one of the game giveaways with over 21 thousand downloads made for Spirit of Wandering: The Legend…… Nice one

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Developers rely on good feedback to improve their games. If you download this game PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE take some time once you’ve played it a while to leave some constructive feedback either positive or negative. The more constructive feedback we get, the more likely developers are to give more games away. The giveaway site already has a very good standing with search engines like Google. Developers want their products out there on the WWW, this site has the potential to do that. The game giveaway project gives away on average between 9 to 17 thousand downloads for each game depending upon what genre and how obscure the game is. That’s a lot of homes these games are being downloaded into and a lot of potential cash that’s being lost by the developers. If we get better games because of better feedback, the community are likely to continue to benefit from the generosity of the developers. Satisfied community members are then more likely to visit the home sites of those developers and purchase games that they may not have bothered with before they discovered the developer via the game giveaway site, thus giving the developers more incentives to give away more decent games to draw more users to their site. There are a lot of game sites and they all want your buisness. I really do think if we can improve on the quality and numbers of users leaving suitable feedback more developers will join the project. It’s a great environment to recruit beta testers as well; giving the community the oppertunity to try out games that aren’t on general release yet.

Again PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE leave some suitable feedback once you’ve played the game for an hour or so. It can be positive or negative, but please explain your reasons for the feedback you post. It doesn’t need to be a dissertation, just a paragraph or two explaining what you think could improve the game and maybe what you didn’t like about the game with suggestions to replace the negative area’s. Thank you in advance to all those who take the time to post a constructive comment. It will be very much appreciated by the developer, the giveaway team and me. Thank you.

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Installation:

The game downloads to a 39.9 MB zip file that unpacks to a read me with the terms and conditions plus a dual activation and setup module (the orange icon with the key symbol) Click on the module to install and register the game. to those new to the game giveaway project, basically this means that once the game has installed the game is activated.

The game installs to the following path by default, but can be changed during the installation wizard. The C drive may be different depending upon if you have more than one hard drive installed and whether your OS is installed to the C drive or a different one like mine (which is the F drive):

C:\Games\BeaKing2

There is no shortcut installed to either the desktop or the start menu/programs list. Also there’s no uninstaller. There is no significant registry files installed so to uninstall the game all you need to do is delete the games installed folder. You can create your own shortcut by following the path detailed above and opening the games folder then right clicking on the executable and select the option from the drop down menu that sends a shortcut to the desktop. you can also create one for the start menu programs list if you wish. to do this you need to find the start menu folder that’s located for Vista and Win 7 within your profiles folder in the appdata folder (which is a hidden folder), or in XP in the Documents and Settings folder . To find it in Win 7 or vista is a little more complex than it used to be, but it’s useful to know if you like to rearange your programs list, especially if it’s become very large. you can find it via the following path. becasue it’s located within a hidden folder you will need to go to the Control Panel and find folder options, then chenge folders to not hidden:

Start Menu > Profile Name > AppData > Roaming > Microsoft > Windows > Start Menu > Programs

Introduction:

We did get Be a King: Lost Lands, the first in the series way back in November 2009. Today’s version has had some excellent upgrades and improvements; enough to make this a worthwhile sequel.

The developer introduces the game with the following blurb:

Try to rule your land as the prince. Save the Kingdom of your father, rebuild villages and towns and restore peace and prosperity. Defend your minions against hordes of monsters and bandits. Be a just and determined ruler, and realize the dream of becoming a brave king who leads his people to a better future!”Be a King 2″ is a fantasy strategy game. It offers fast and entertaining game play. You – as a ruler of a medieval kingdom – must build towns and cities, defend them against raiders and perform various objectives. Enjoy the medieval atmosphere in lovely fantasy graphics!

Reference accessed HERE January 20th 2012

Features:

1) … Play 37 original levels

2) … Use 12 different types of buildings to grow your cities

3) … Upgrade the buildings – each building has 3 variants

4) … Defend your lieges against hordes of monsters and bandits

5) … Fulfil different types of objectives

6) … Train heroes and complete a lot of adventurous quests

7) … Listen to the orchestral soundtrack inspired by film music

The Game:

This is an excellent mix of time management, strategy, building and tower defense, with over 35 levels to work through. To make the game more challenging you can toggle time limits to complete each level (which is where the time management comes in). The game is set to untimed as default. To change between timed and untimed toggle the tick box that you can find to the top left of the levels map. There are three stages represented by maps; the tutorial map has seven levels to complete and both of the Eastern and Western Kingdoms have 15 levels.

The aim of the game is to build towns and cities using the available resources at hand, and defend them against raiders and monsters attacking from outside the town and thieves from within the town’s community. You can start playing any one of the three maps, but you have to start from the beginning because all but the first level in each map are locked. You can win either bronze, silver or gold awards depending upon the length of time it takes to complete the city building. These times are measured in game time weeks (not real time). For example in the tutorial levels, if you can complete your city in four week you’ll be awarded a gold medal, for the bronze it’s five weeks and three days. To attain a bronze in the very last level you have to complete in 31 weeks and 1 day.

As you progress through the levels the time to build steadily increases as levels become more complex. Throughout the game you will be given various quests to complete which give you gold and other bonuses which can be used to buy more resources so that you can expand your towns population by building more houses to live in, building food production facilities such as farms to feed your population, service buildings such as mills, inns, traders and bakeries to increase food production, and military buildings to defend and protect your population. To build these facilities you will require resources such as wood and stone which can be purchased using the gold you earn by fulfilling tasks and killing enemies. All buildings require some measure of these resources plus more gold and people to build the property. You need to juggle the types of buildings you create so as to maximize all aspects of the games resources, for example you should ensure you have enough homes to house the population, enough military installations to protect your homes and enough service installations to ensure a profit is made. No profit and you may run out of gold to create the necessary buildings that are required to complete a level. Sometimes it may be necessary to demolish a building so that you can utilize the resources that you gain from doing this. All buildings can be upgraded. There are three levels of upgrading available.

Once you have barracks built you can hire heroes to complete quests and random events as well as help to defend your town from monsters. Each military installation acts as a tower defense, though for outside attackers you require mage towers as barracks are less effective against outside attackers. The following are suggested tips to help you win:

Tips:

1) … Watch for advice from the in game advisor. He is situated at the bottom right of the screen. If you want to read the previous message click on the button provided

2) … Build barracks mage or Wizards towers as soon as possible to protect your town

3) … Barracks protect your town against street crime but are not as effective against attackers from outside, use mage or wizards towers instead

4) … If you don’t have enough money to improve your defenses you can destroy unused buildings to create space for more protection and gain money from the resources created from the destroyed building.

5) … You can send a hero to kill monsters or raiders, but these can be lost.

6) … Complete random quests because these can bring in much needed resources and random bonuses

7) … Build buildings that make you a lot of money first as this will make game play easier later in the game.

8 ) … The more raw materials you buy in a single deal the bigger the discount you get

9) … Mini Objectives windows show your goals and your active stats in brackets.

The game starts with several tutorial levels ,the first one tells you how to create barracks to defend your city the second one to build two farms so that you can feed your population and the third shws you how to upgrade your buildings. Completing all seven tutorial levels will enable to to complete the main game with confidence. Initially only a few levels are unlocked to play; 1 each on the tutorial map and on the Western and Eastern maps. The Western map is the hardest to complete.

To the upper right of the screen you’ll occasionally see an adviser pop up with useful advice about what tasks require completing as well as useful information to complete missions that you may be involved in.

To the bottom of the playing area is the information panel that contains four tabs. These are:

1) … Information

2) … Material

3) … Workers

4) … Building

With each level you will be given specific objectives, for example, in the very first tutorial level you’ll be asked to build three barracks. You can read about the importance of barracks and all of the other buildings that are available via the strategy guide that’s accessible from the main menu. There’s useful information about all aspects of the game in this strategy guide including tips on winning the game (which I’ve listed above.

To access objectives once you’ve closed the main objectives window that appears in the top right hand corner of the game area when you start a new level just click on the info tab that’s located along the bottom of the game area. The info tab shows all of the important data about the town such as the total population, growth rate, income and the number of people your town can adequately feed and protect. To the right of this information you’ll find what your current tasks/objectives are, for example in one of the initial tutorial levels you have to create a farm and ensure there is enough housing to allow 15 subjects to live in your town. The materials tab shows the different materials that are available to buy. Buying in bulk gets you more materials for your gold, so if you have enough it’s worth purchasing the larger amounts. The workers tab enables you to hire workers to build specific buildings, and once you own barracks you can hire heroes Each building requires different numbers of builders which can be hired via this panel. The final tab shows you the different types of buildings available as well as upgrades when you select individual buildings. Upgraded buildings house more people and earn higher rents. To build a building you first need to select an empty building plot from the game arena.

I’ve quite a few screen captures, but not as many as in the previous game (I just didn’t have the time to play more than a few levels to ascertain whether the games were similar). One of the most striking changes is the use of clouds to create a type of fog of war effect, obscuring all but the area you can build on at that time. Different buildings confer different degrees of reduction in cloud cover. Each level can be replayed at any time once it’s been unlocked. The tutorials don’t have to be played before you unlock levels in the two Kingdoms. The tutorial map has been designed to introduce you to the various aspects of the game in a logical way, so jumping ahead to later levels may mean you miss some important information that will help you make the most of the resources that are available. At the end of a level you’ll be notified whether you’ve won a gold, silver or bronze trophy; you can access the trophy room from the main menu), then you are given your level statistics that include time to complete in weeks and days, heroes joined, gold received, events completed and several others. Following this an image of your castle/palace will appear. As you progress through the game this will look better and better.

You can create multiple profiles which makes this an ideal family game. your progress is saved to the last complete level you completed. It doesn’t save partly completed levels.

Minimum requirements:

Windows XP/ Vista/ 7

1.2GHz cpu or better

3D capable video card

56MB System RAM

OpenGL recomended

Images:

You can see a slideshow of about 60 images HERE. Unfortunately they aren’t in a logical order. I forgot to rename the captures before I uploaded them this morning. I wasn’t able to complete all the images I wanted (basically all seven of the tutorial levels, but may do so over the course of the day; (depends on whether I have the time). The great thing about this game is you can always redo a particular tutorial level once it’s been unlocked to refresh your memory; especially if you’ve not played the game in a while.

Video’s of Gameplay:

You can find Be a King 2 Video’s HERE and HERE.

Walkthrough

You can find a short walkthrough HERE

Conclusion

Be a King 2 is a throughly enjoyable game, especially if you like the way this game has tied in a few genres for example strategy, time management and tower defence and it’s a nice change from the usual games we’ve been getting recently.

The game is easy to play but should give hours of absorbing fun and pleasure to those who like this type of game or at least one of the genres represented. To be honest I reckon most will like some elements to the game. It’s a game with no overt violence. There is a small element with the tower defence aspect of the game, but this is minimal and isn’t graphic, so hopefully won’t be seen as inappropriate to play as a family game with youngish children around. Children and adults of all ages should enjoy this game, with a simple and easy to follow set of tutorial levels and two seperate kimgdoms to win over.

Overall I’m really pleased with this game an enjoyed writing the review. Thank you to the developer Rake in Grass, the developer 300AD and the game giveaway team for bringing us some new games. I look forwards to another good game tomorrow.

Graphics … 8

Sound … 7.5

Game play … 8

Re-playability … 7

Total … 30.5 out of 40 that’s a score of approx 7.6 out of 10 which equates to A must have download.

Suggestions:

I think the game could have been improved with the addition of more medals and achievements, for example for completing all of the levels on each map to gold standard, or finishing the first kingdom or for using different tactics/strategies to win the game. Even one for completing all levels. It would also have been nice to see extras added that could be unlocked and mini games to break up the levels. maybe some secret levels as well. I’d also have included the ability to choose from different elements to add to the castle that was slowly build up over time. different wall types, turrets walls and paths as well as trees and other items.

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Problems installing, activating and running today’s game:

If you have difficulty downloading or activating the game you can try again later or do one of the following – for example once downloaded when you click on the dual activation and set up file you may get the message “Failed to connect. Please try again later” Check to see if your internet explorer isn’t offline (thanks to MrSnoozles/Mike and GMMan for that fix). If the previous suggestion doesn’t work go check out previous comments from the last several weeks and look for comments from GMMan and Mike. They have also posted their possible fixes for this problem.

Mike suggests that you check to see if Internet Explorer is offline (even if you use firefox). If it is make sure that it’s online thn try again. I’ve always tried re-booting my modem and/or router with some success, though Mike has said that doing that does nothing. Still, it’s worth a try if all else fails.

If you are getting the black screen problem right click on the games executable and select properties then click on the compatibility mode and select the disable visual themes. This should fix the problem, if not try disabling the display scaling on higher dpi settings and disabling the desktop composition.

Other fixes include changing your screen resolution, installing the latest direct X (remember that XP uses DX 9 or earlier only, Vista uses DX 10 or before and Win 7 DX11 or before). Also try updating your graphics drivers. The main two chip manufacturers are NVIDIA and ATI both of which offer driver downloads for free. Just go to the respective manufactures home page and you’ll find a link to the driver download page. To find out which graphic card or graphics chip your computer uses type in Dxdiag in the search field (Vista or Win 7) or the run command (XP); this opens up the DirectX diagnostics panel. click on the display tab and look to the left panel. You should easily see what graphics card or chip you are using. (This is required information when selecting the correct download from the developers site).

If you are asked to turn off your Data Execution Prevention for this game to run. You can create an exception so that the game will run without having to turn DEP off. Please bear in mind it’s rare that anyone even mentioned getting a DEP warning. If you are not sure how to create an exception read THIS article, which tells you how to do it.

If you are having problems unzipping the game giveaways zip file, for example getting a message saying the file is invalid try using a different file archiver such as 7-Zip, J-Zip, CAM UnZip, Hamster Free Zip Archiver, GZip, B Zip2, peazip, ZipUnzip, FreeRAR Extract Frog, RAR File Open Knife, ALZip, The Extractor, RarZilla Free Unrar

Okay, that should be enough. there are actually many more free versions available. also there are other commercial titles such as the well-known WinRAR, Stuffit, WinAce, NXPowerlite and Corel Winzip Pro, but IMO 7-Zip is probably one of the better freebies. I did purchase a copy of Stuffit when it was on sale a few years ago, but didn’t like the interface for some reason, so hardly ever use it.

If you are posting requests for help late in the day I would suggest posting in the main giveaway forums in the game Game Discussion . If you’ve installed the game but it won’t work for some reason, it should still be registered, so someone may be able to help at another time. Unfortunately if your problem is actually installing it then once the giveaway period is over there’s nothing that can be done until the game is given away again (though that isn’t guaranteed. It’s always worth checking out the free games sites as sometimes the games we get here are also available for free from them as well.

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If you are looking for something else other than a puzzle game check out the game discussion forums and the free games synopsis. We’ve posted a couple of thousand free games over the last three years, some of which are fantastic. All of the major game distributors such as Steam, Direct 2 Drive (soon to combine with another site), Impulse and GOG all have some sales with savings as good as 75% in some cases. For example this weekend you can get 75% off the Dead space franchise. The first game (Dead Space) costs less than a cheap arcade game at only $5/£2.50 or you can get EDGE, the award winning retro-styled platform game for 50% off, or Nation Red a top down zombie shooter for only £2 (75% off) plus other deals. Tjhere’s a new 24hr deal later today (replacing Edge). You can check out all of the main distributors deals via the Didematic Site

Downloaded and installed the game without any problems, however when I played it for the first time after making a new character the game screen kept flashing as in a flicker movement. Closed the game and redid it under xp which made it fail to open.

Keep getting error “Failed to open main.cs” no matter what I do now. Upon google searches and site help came up nothing.

Windows 7
1.6 GHz
768 MB ram

…………………Moderator comment……………………

Check the requirements. This game requires Open GL. You may need to install a newer version than you have, however, before you do that try going into the options and changing the graphics driver setting from the default Open GL to D3D (Direct X). The recommended setting is Open GL, but it will play with Direct X. you may need to update both. Google Open GL and Direct X (Microsoft) for download links. Depending upon your graphics card you may require a specific version of open GL for example my graphcs cards support open GL 4.0, but earlier cards may only support 2.0. however I think the latest versions may be backwards compatible?

According to omroth in the frozen synapse forums “Failed to open main.cs” means you are using the wrong working directory. Make sure you’re running frozenSynapse.exe from within the directory which has main.cs in it”. Be a King 2 also has this file in it’s working directory so make sure it’s there. (reference – http://forums.mode7games.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=2855 )

I noticed you only have 768MB of RAM. Is this for your graphics card or your system RAM. If it’s for the latter you need that amount to run windows. If you are running other background programs that may be causing a problem. Try running Game Booster by iobit. It can reduce RAM usage by 40%. Easy to use and once you’ve finished playing your game you can revert back to normal at the push of a button.

hopefully the tekkies amongst the community will have other suggestions if none of mine work. please let me know eithr way. Thank you.