World of Kings is Loong Entertainment’s latest mobile free-to-play MMO. World of Kings is a single faction, fantasy MMO that started in Asia and has now come West. The backstory seems typical. Your striving to be the best hero you can be fighting groups of people like the Doom Legion, etc. The story is perhaps the game’s weakest point. It just wasn’t engaging and early on it presents you with so much unvoiced dialogue text. At some point it felt like you were doing more reading than leveling. By level 15-ish or so I got tired of reading and either skimmed the dialogue text or just tapped through it. The English translation is great but not perfect as well.
After a well done, but slightly familiar, introductory cut scene you’ll start in the character creation screen. This is immediately where you can’t but help compare the artwork to WoW. You can select from one of four races; Human, High Elf, Orc, or Dwarf. Typical choices indeed. On the plus side you can choose from one of nine playable classes, granted many of them are familiar if you’ve played a fantasy based MMO. Upon reaching level 30 you can start working on one of three advanced or awakened classes for your starting class. This leads into classes like Vampire, Necromancer, Chaos Warlock, etc.
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One thing that is obvious at the start is that musically speaking the game shines. This is no surprise considering Loong Entertainment hired Russell Brower to do the game's composing. Russell is best known for doing some of the music for World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and Diablo 3. Too familiar? Perhaps but a wonderful match-up, nonetheless.
Loong Entertainment also managed to hire some quality voice actors, mostly for cut scenes as quest voice dialogue is limited. Hire talent includes Dave Fennoy (The Walking Dead, Marvel’s Spider-Man), Jason Vandebrake (Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, World Of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth) and Joe Ziela (Metro Exodus, Fire Emblem Heroes).
What About Combat And Questing?
Combat and questing by default are set for the dreaded auto-questing and auto-combat, which seems to be the most common nowadays in mobile gameplay. Auto-move can be disabled, and you can enable a “click-to-move”. Auto-questing seemed to be more on than off, especially if you tap through the dialogue. More times than I cared for, tapping the last screen in a dialogue chain resulted in my toon taking flight to the next quest destination.
Manual movement (non-click-to-move) and camera rotation are performed using the typical two-thumb on-screen joystick approach. This makes it a bit more difficult to play on a larger screen like an iPad.
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The game does have a cool auto-combat setting where you can prioritize your skills. Skills are upgradeable and you’ll also put points into a talent tree. Another cool feature exists in the talent tree where the UI tells you what percentage of people decide to pick or advance that skill. It dumbs down the talent tree and is a welcome addition for people like me who aren’t into “theory crafting”. This at least guarantees I have a build similar to most others even though not original.
The UI is jam packed, even on a large screen cell phone like the iPhone XS Max. A lot of red dot indicators just begging for your attention. Early on you’ll also have to deal with loot spam messages scrolling by. Level 20 seems to be the magic level where the developers feel you’re a dedicated player. Settings for friend requests, etc. are geared towards this level cutoff.
A Full Fledged MMO
There’s no doubt that World Of Kings has plenty of features built in. Things like equipment enhancement and socketing, guild support, a pet system, dungeons, raids will make veteran MMO players feel right at home.
The PvP modes include 5v5 battlefield where the first team to blow-up their opponents’ base wins. There’s also a duel PvP mode of 3v3 or 5v5 using preset abilities.
There’s even an NPC mercenary system akin to the Legion Hall mission system in WoW where you send your NPCs out to quest for rewards, etc. Other notable features include a marriage system, flying mounts, trade system, appearance / fashion system, artifacts and crafting.
Of course no F2P mobile game would be complete without in-game shops, daily login rewards, acheivement/milestone rewards. Real life cash purchases net “top-up coupons” which can be spent on costumes, mounts, social items, items to help with crafting, etc.
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There are also modest subscription level tiers of $1.99, $2.99 and $4.99 USD a month that yields increased stamina, diamonds, XP, etc.
Bottom Line
There are a lot of things to do in World Of Kings, or WoK, and it’s truly is a fully fledged solid MMO. For whatever reason the game has a fun factor that made even auto-questing fun. It probably has a lot to do with the quick leveling up process and attaining nice drops and loot, even epic loot at times. A lot of it might seem familiar and the story is undeniably forgettable but the sense of power the game gives your avatar, even a cloth based Mage seems exhilarating.
Score: 7.5/10
Pros
- Extensive class system
- Top notch soundtrack
- Robust feature set
- Rewarding gameplay and login
Cons
- Too many WoW similarities
- Auto-questing gets in the way too much
- Story is skippable
