Giveaway of the Day - Be a King: Lost Lands

Be a King: Lost Lands

Today’s game is new to the giveaway project. The downloaded zip file is 25.4Mb and the installed game expands to 27.8Mb. Unfortunately the ????? still persists, but the game installs with no problems by clicking on the lowermost button to the left. As usual with Game giveaways there’s no shortcut installed so make a note of where it’s being installed to. The default is C:\Games\To be a King. If you’ve not cleared your internet cache for a while you may find it tries to install itself to a previous giveaway; for me it tried to install to Nitroracers (I didn’t bother installing yesterdays game on this computer because I still had the original which was a later version). Once you’ve located the installed game open it up and select the games executable which is within the first folder (not the common folder). If you want to create a desktop and start menu shortcut I’ve created a short tutorial which can be found HERE

If you are a first time user of the game giveaway project or you’ve previously opted not to install software informer please check the installation window for any tick boxes. And report your findings here. I can’t say for certain whether you need to uncheck or check any boxes to stop Software Informer from installing. I seem to remember you had to opt in to install it, but from the experiences of a couple of giveaway members yesterday you may actually have to opt out?

In my opinion it may be worth the risk of installing today’s game. If software informer does install it can be uninstalled via the uninstaller found within the applications folder. It’s unfortunate that we are having this problem with the installer regarding the ????? at this time. Unfortunately I cannot make any other recommendations at this time though.

300AD have been kind enough to give us the latest version v1.2 which as you can see from the introduction contains extra content.

Introduction:

28th March: We released a new version (1.2) of Be a King – Lost Lands! This update includes one new map with 12 levels and two new buildings. This update is free for Be a King owners!

Try to rule your land as the prince. Build and maintain villages, towns and even big cities! 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” is a fantasy strategy game. It offers fast and entertaining game play for all players. 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 20th Nov 09 HERE

The Game:

This is an excellent mix of time management, strategy, building and tower defense, with over 25 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.

The aim of the game is to build towns and cities using the available resources at hand, and defend them against raiders, monsters attacking from outside the town and thieves from within the town’s community. 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 bough 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 quest 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 levels:

Tips:

• 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 provide

• Build barracks or mage towers as soon as possible to protect your town

• Barracks protect your town against street crime but are not as effective against attackers from outside 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.

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

• Complete random quests because these can bring in much needed resources and random bonuses

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

• The more raw materials you buy in a single deal the bigger the discount you get

• Mini Objectives windows show your goals and your active stats in brackets.

The game starts with three tutorial levels the first one tells you how to create buildings, the second one Defense and the third heroes and game events.

To the upper right of the screen you’ll occasionally see an advisor 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. info

2. material

3. workers

4. building.

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 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 hires 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 taken screenshots of all three tutorial levels which includes over 100 images. You can either see these all on one page or as a slide show. Watching the slideshow will give you a good grounding in the game, however you can see all the same tutorial messages while playing the game for the first time. Each level can be replayed at any time once it’s been unlocked. The tutorials have to be played before you can unlock later levels. However, there is a levels un-locker available though at this point I don’t know whether it will work with the version we are getting. I’ll be able to report on that later once I’ve installed the full version. That said, the game 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.

Game features:

• Play 25 + 12 original levels

• Use 7 + 2 different types of buildings to grow your cities

• Upgrade the buildings – each building has 3 variants

• Defend your minions against hordes of monsters and bandits

• Fulfill different types of objectives

• Train heroes and complete complex adventurous quests

Minimum requirements:

PC Windows or Mac OS X 10.3+

1GHz, 128MB RAM

OpenGL

Conclusion:

Despite the ???? problem during installation the game itself installs okay. The game is definitely worth having in your games library. The game play isn’t too hard nor too easy and with an in depth tutorial system, even newbie’s to gaming should find the game relatively easy to play. I like the conglomeration of several types of games that have been incorporated into this game. There’s enough game play to keep you going for a couple of days at least though that depends upon how you play the game. I do think it’s a little prescriptive, but I will be keeping it for the occasional moments when I fancy this type of game. Well worth 7 out of 10 in my opinion.

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Resources:

Videos and Images:

You can see in game footage by watching a couple of videos of the game HERE and HERE

There are loads of Google Images HERE and over a hundred (111) screen captures of the games tutorial levels plus some of other levels as well as the menus all on one page where you can then select individual images to see as a larger resolution image (800 x 600), you’ll find a slider to the top right of the page which enables you to increase the size of the thumbnails. HERE. There’s also a slideshow of all the images (It takes about 4 to 5 minutes to scroll through all the images) HERE.

Theres a worthwhile full review of the game from Gamezebo HERE.

Level Unlocker:

You can get a level un-locker for this game that unlocks all the levels HERE

Instructions for using the Unlocker:

This will unlock all the levels if you used it correctly. When you have selected your character, but before you start the game hit F12, then hit start game, you will then go to the screen that shows all your missions to complete, now they are all available to access. Now before you pick the mission you want to play you must turn the cheat off by hitting F12 again.. Im not sure whether this cheat will work with the version we were given, but the level versions do agree, so theres a good chance it does. I’ve not tested it yet.

Alternative Games:

I counted over 50 strategy games, life simulation and tower defence games in the free games synopsis. Overall there are over a thousand games included in the list. Amongst the ones I selected you’ll find some brilliant games such as Glest, Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War, command & Conquer Red Alert I and Command & Conquer Tiberium Dawn, all of which were commercial games originally (Though I think Glest has always been freeware). You can find all those games Here

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Thanks Terry. I reviewed the game with the sound off (due to it being the early hours of the morning and I didn’t want the wake the family), so missed those anomalies. That said, the overall quality of today’s game is a credit to Rake in Grass’s usual standard; lets hope they take note of your observations.

The game is definitely a change from the usual poorly constructed games we’ve been getting over the past several months (no disrespect to Handmade games who have IMO created a couple of decent space orientated games) and is different enough from the usual arcade games such as the Match 3, Time Management and Hidden Objects that seem to have taken over the arcade industry. Of course it’s all about personal choice. Those games (H.O.G’s, Match 3’s, etc) wouldn’t be so prevalent if they weren’t so popular.