Genre: RPG
Publisher: Got Game
Developer: 1C
Release Date: November 30, 2004

PC gaming is a very different beast from the console scene. Because the differences between the two camps are so pronounced, I must admit to something before continuing with this review: I am primarily a console gamer.

Currently I own a Gamecube, Playstation 2, Xbox, Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS, and an enormous collection of legacy hardware. I stick with consoles because they are great for offline multiplayer and the games are usually released in complete, working form (unlike, say, Temple of Elemental Evil). Besides, as of a few days ago, my main computer platform is now a Apple Powerbook G4; obviously, I won't be doing too much gaming on it outside of Halo, Doom 3, and maybe World of Warcraft.

But my urge to play PC games has been rising exponentially. Console games are almost always so corporate, so polished, so inhuman, and it gets tiring after a while. Once in a blue moon, consoles will play host to a small-team production's attempt to blindside the gigantic publishers that secure most of the licensing rights – such as the phenomenal Alien Hominid – but more often than not, the result of such an effort is poor sales or outright cancellation before release… a fate recently suffered by Jeff Minter, the eccentric developer of the axed Unity.

I need some obscurity in my gaming. I need to play a game that makes me feel proud of the three or four guys who worked on it. And that's why I am now writing this review for Konung 2: Blood of the Titans.

Sadly, despite the relative obscurity involved and the small team that developed it, Konung 2 feels less like a labor of love and more like an attempt at taking advantage of the RPG-addicted segment of the PC gaming community. The game is clearly buggy, which makes it noticeable that this is a bargain-bin title. The battle system is as vanilla as it could possibly be. The addictiveness of an experience mill is fully intact, but it sits within the shell of a game with a broken interface. Judging by reviews of the first Konung, things haven't really improved much at all This game seems to be a sequel released for the sake of having a sequel, and it has released nearly a decade too late – as a pre-Diablo release, it might have meant something. But now… it's a little embarrassing.

The game touts itself as a real-time strategy-cum-role-playing game-cum-adventure game. In reality, there isn't much strategy involved, and the adventuring is minimal. However, if your definition of "role-playing" is a straightforward experience mill, then Konung 2 has your number.

The concept of a game based solely on doing repetitive tasks to become stronger in order to clear an area, then work again to clear the next, is mundane when written out in such a fashion as you have just put your eyes on. But it can be made fun. Diablo proved this. So did the Elder Scrolls series. So did Phantasy Star Online, for christ's sake! Such a simple concept can be executed well with a single, yet difficult, proposition put into motion: B-A-L-A-N-C-E. What the aforementioned games have, Konung 2 doesn't.

This is a game where you will die. Again. And again. And again. Difficulty is not something that I'm afraid of; I usually revel in it. But in Konung 2, a game based mostly on clicking the enemy and watching the "action," uncompromising difficulty is what makes the game, well, not fun. For the first few hours of the game, surviving each battle is more a roll of the die than anything else. And since most of the items that are found cannot be used until your character is built up quite a bit, the difficulty cannot be let up by much of a player-controlled situation. It's almost complete luck.

The non-linear way the game plays out makes the world have a fantastic, wide-open, living, breathing feel. Or at least it would be fantastic if the surroundings had any interesting parts to them whatsoever. None of the area designs seem to have much method besides placing buildings in random spots around the towns and having boring, muddy ground textures covering the rest of the world.

The strangest thing about this game is the buggy interface. Dragging the selector box to click all the members of your party does not always work correctly, often leaving characters out of the fray for no apparent reason, and other times letting them in on it in an extremely similar situation. The movement engine is so sluggish, even for a game of this genre, that the characters seem more out of control than need be. A few times, characters unselected themselves for no apparent reason. Spending time wrestling with the broken basics of this overly simplistic game make the entire event much harder to deal with than needed.

Konung 2's appearance is its worst feature right next to the gameplay itself. Pre-rendered graphics straight out of 1995 make up all of the sights, and they have little sense of artistic value in their presentation to make up for the technical loss. I completely support crafting a game with low-end PC users in mind, but at least make an effort to pretty things up within the confines of the engine! The characters are bland and animate poorly. Worse yet, the ground textures and building layouts are of bad homebrew quality. I'm sure at least 40 cheap cash-in Korean MMORPGs were sporting better graphics than this back in the last millennium. A new, single player retail release should not look like this.

Sound is where things are not horrible, but simply mediocre. The expected muffled sword slaps and boring in-game music with that traditional "PC RPG" feel are all here. None of it is very good, but at least the sounds weren't recorded with a spoon and an empty can of hash using a laptop's internal microphone, or anything like that.

Konung 2 is still a game that clearly was a labor of love – it just wasn't a very calculated one. The developers are obviously fans of the tough-as-nails older PC RPGs and were trying to emulate that experience here, but their obvious inexperience with development has created a glitchy, cookie-cutter type of game that does not belong on anybody's hard drive. These guys need to cut their losses, get back to playing the games they love, and try their hands at another one in a couple of years.

Score: 4.5/10