Hero of the Kingdom III (2018)

Playtime: 7,5 hours (completed)

Intro

The Hero of the Kingdom games are casual point & click adventure games in which you also look for hidden objects.

A cautionary tale about feature creep

After the disappointing second entry i was curious to see if they had learnt from their mistakes and maybe fixed the interface and annoying timers. Instead, they doubled down on everything bad.

The Good

HOTK3 starts out promising. You can buy from stores from the map without travelling to an area. Your skills level when you use them (like in Skyrim). Pickups and enemies respawn much more often. Best of all, healing (and crafting) is now done from a freely accessible menu, without an annoying unskippable animation. Even the pacing is fine. At first.

The Bad

Basically, it seems like they tried to turn this into a point & click Skyrim. You get endless opportunities to gather and improve. The problem is, that isn't fun at all in a point & click adventure. And it's made worse by the insane grind. Yes, they put grinding in a P&C game. I thought i was hoarding excessively like i always do, picking up everything i could, and i still ran out of materials at times.

The Ugly

The way combat works is that you need an X amount of equipment, consumables, skill and health (which function as action points) to defeat each enemy. Your equipment often breaks. They and consumables take materials to craft. Skill requires grinding. Health requires food, which requires materials to craft. You have to go back to areas already visited to gather these items manually.

Then comes the worst part. The crafting. You can craft different meal, giving enough food to heal 0,5-2 times. Potions come in batches of 1-3. You can't see the required materials unless you don't have them. Each time you craft you have to click on space A and take the item in space B. And there are timers for everything. The best meal takes seven seconds to make (yes, i timed it). Potions take forever because of the small batches and different requirements. Equipment creation can fail.

Conclusion

HOTK3 is 2 hours longer than the previous game and twice as long as the first game. And i'm not exaggerating when i say that at least half of that time is spent sitting in this shitty crafting menu with it's fucking timers. You have to craft well over a hundred times, probably hundreds of times. Why the fuck did anyone think this was good game design?

Oh, and did i mention you still have to go to the inventory screen to actually see your resources? And there's still no journal or anything? And the skill requirements -especially for combat- are absurd and require finding randomly respawning enemies?

I have never in my life seen a series devolve and degenerate so badly.