For the King II takes us on an exciting and deadly journey through Fahrul, about 20 years after the events of the first game. This time, we are contending with the dictator Queen Rosomon and her loyal queensguard as we hop from tile to tile, hoping to stoke the fires of the resistance and take all the loot for ourselves.

As a tabletop roleplaying game fan, one of the standout features of For the King II that first grabbed my attention was how much playing in Multiplayer felt like a late-night D&D one shot. There are a handful of character classes available to choose from the get go: Blacksmith, Herbalist, Stablehand, Scholar, and Hunter. For my character, it was an obvious choice: Herbalist. There isn’t much in the way of customization other than primary and secondary armor color choices, and I liked the general theme and character models well enough for my Herbalist.

Like in most tabletop games, there is a core story in the first act of For the King II: set the characters free, join the resistance, and eventually stick it to the man. Our group was itching to get going. It was like a pack of dogs pulling at their leashes, begging to be set free into the world. The hex map was full of side events just begging to be triggered, and who better to run headfirst into goblin ambushes? However, as we followed the story events and started to get a better handle on For the King II’s turn-based combat, a few problems started to emerge.

The tutorial did a fantastic job at setting us up to play For the King II, but informational tooltips could definitely use a little work. For example, we were considering adding Blacksmith to our party line-up in character creation. Wanting to know more about their abilities, we clicked to learn more and were greeted with “Passive: Steadfast.”

That’s it. No real explanation that explained what benefit that added to the character. I guess you could kind of infer it from context clues, but for me, I would rather be able to know what it actually does instead of making assumptions. There are a few other instances of this throughout gameplay mentioned on items or abilities. It isn’t debilitating to gameplay, but it was certainly annoying when starting out.

Jelly Time

Our second major challenge would have to be getting a little too ahead of ourselves. In the first few story quests, we arrived at a town where we could purchase items, hire mercenaries, or accept side quests. Feeling a little brave, we decided to take on a bounty quest to hunt down a green jelly in the forest. Just one jelly, how bad could it be? Well, we found the jelly - or jellies in this case. 

All three green jellies had twice as much HP as our party and slapped us silly. Before starting the fight, in the combat preview, it just showed one jelly monster. Typically, the combat window gives you an accurate estimate of how many creatures you’ll be fighting. If it was just one jelly, we probably would have been fine. Three jellies that were all one level higher than us however…well, that was the end of that adventure. 

Live to Fight Another Turn

From then on, combat felt like a literal toss of the dice. Sometimes, we would know exactly what we were going up against, and other times, we’d be up for a gnarly surprise. Thankfully, you can flee if you’re in the back line and succeed in all your rolls. Though, more often than not, the dice wouldn’t be on our side. Later, we’d discover we could burn Focus to guarantee success on those dice rolls.

All of a sudden, Focus became a lot more useful! It felt like rolling with advantage or getting a guaranteed natural 20 on your roll. So, even in those rare instances where it felt like the world was out to get us, we slowly but surely learned to use Focus to get us out of those sticky situations.

Slow to Start

Since For the King II is a strategy adventure, there is a lot of pausing, deliberating, and of course - strategizing. At first, this created a sluggish feeling to the start of the game. We probably took way more time than necessary to discuss strategies or learn what the best way to optimize our characters would be. However, this could be attributed to the learning curve and our group is new to the For the King franchise. There was a lot of trial and error with learning our abilities and how we could best synergize with the party or discussing who would benefit the most from a specific weapon or piece of armor. 

After a few hours of gameplay, we slowly slid into a comfortable pacing that worked well for our party. We also discovered a few bits in the game settings that helped speed things up, like the option to automatically end your turn when your character spent all of its movement. One less mouse-click, and it automatically threw it to the next player in the turn order!

Random Encounters

One of my favorite features of For the King II was the random events. A few standouts were the Night Market and the Dark Carnival because of all the fun loot we were able to earn or purchase. One of these was the “Toy Hammer” which had the hilarious ability to “Bop” and “Bonk” the enemy. 

There are also tons of dungeons and delves available for adventuring. The very first dungeon we mustered up the courage to challenge culminated in a Mimic in the final room that we had to defeat to claim our treasure. Hearing the terrified and delighted screams of my party as we realized what was happening (and that no, we were not in fact imagining that that chest had teeth) is probably one of my favorite gaming moments in recent memory. There are so many small moments like this that happened throughout our campaign that made me think back fondly on some of our previous tabletop gaming adventures.

For the King II really nailed that D&D-esque adventure vibe. 

Final Thoughts

For the King II is a fantastic addition to your Steam library if you’re a fan of strategy and tabletop games. There is a little bit of a learning curve if you’re new to the franchise, but once you find that groove it is an absolute blast. With new adventures to be found in every hex, you’ll easily lose hours diving into the world of Fahrul with friends as you leave chaos in your wake.

Full Disclosure: A copy of this game was provided by PR for the purposes of this review. Reviewed on PC.