Originally, I planned to write this review of Kemco and EXE-Create's latest RPG offering with as much effort as the game seems to have had put into its creation. But if I did that, this review would already be over. Kemco has never been a company I would accuse of overachieving, but the last couple of years have been particularly rough. They've worked with a couple of new developers and published the odd title that breaks from their norm, but it's looking increasingly like those were one-offs rather than enduring new partnerships. Which leaves us with EXE-Create, probably Kemco's most reliable development partner in recent years. As Kemco has come to rely more and more on EXE-Create's churned-out releases and the market for premium off-line RPGs has shrunk, even the (to be very generous) modest sparks of creativity found in earlier games have all but vanished.
Well, that's an ominous opening paragraph, isn't it" Look, it's not that Heirs of the Kings [$6.99] is a bad game. It's about the same as any random EXE-Create release from the last couple of years. If you're not sick of this particular song and dance yet, it's fine. If you've never played one of these before, you'll probably enjoy this well enough. But with each new release that feels like it came out of a cloning facility, I have to believe that the number of people falling into those aforementioned groups is getting smaller and smaller. Is anyone out there still jazzed about the gacha-adjacent weapon forging...