by Elton Gahr

Created on: July 31, 2009

The Wii is difficult for me to get into. There are two types of games, though that use the Wii-mote for movement, these can be fun if done correctly adding a sense of realism, sadly, they are often imprecise and can become frustrating. The other type simply use the wii-mote as a controller. I tend to prefer these types but in that case I often wish I had a controller that was more like a X-box or playstation controller.

"Little King's Story" is the second type of game, except that it was simple enough in controls that I never felt any real need to have better controls. Instead what I found was myself thinking about Overlord because in many ways these two games are very similar.The major differences are two, one this is made for a younger audience, and two it is a top down game. Neither of these helped in the game itself.

The game's story is quite simple. You are the new king, a young boy who must expand his kingdom. The problem I found immediately with this was that I wanted to be able to build a kingdom like you might build a camp in the average real time strategy game, but there isn't that much freedom. You generally have very little choice of what type of building to make.

Yet this is only one small aspect of the game. The second aspect that you come into is the exploring. The problem I found with this was that it was too limited. You were generally stuck exploring quite slowly. This may speed up later in the game but at the point in the game I reached it felt like there were very few places you could go.

Combat is also quite simple. You have a group of people with you, you can push a button to have them run forward, if they reach an enemy they will attack. More of them will kill it faster. On the bosses it is also useful to be able to call them back so they avoid damage. The only other real strategy is your own wand that you can shoot the enemy with though it does very little damage.

Finally, there is a puzzle aspect to the game. You must choose the correct people to go with you to do what is needed. Soldiers to fight, farmers to dig, engineers to build things, etcetera. Most of the time it is simple to know what you need to do.

This is probably a good game for kids, especially if you want them to have to think and solve things but it is generally too simple for adults and while they tried to make it appeal to older people they didn't quite succeed.

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