I lose. I learn. I come back.

Stay away from For The King II—unless you want the game to haunt your dreams.

I've been playing For The King II for over 24 hours now, and I dream about fighting monsters and waves of enemies at night. No joke. The battles, the time pressure—it all keeps playing out in my mind.

Admittedly, I was pretty frustrated at first. My heroes died left and right, and it easily took me six or seven attempts to complete the first map. If it wasn't the enemies, it was the time. More than once, I was just one dungeon away—and then it was suddenly over.

But that's precisely the point: For The King II is unforgiving, but fair. You learn from every run, adapt your tactics, and gradually improve. Eventually, it clicks—and then the game becomes addictive.

The turn-based combat system is tactical, the random elements keep each playthrough fresh, and the board game feel is a perfect fit. It's fun solo, but it's truly powerful in co-op.

My conclusion: Stick with it, don't give up, and keep trying – you can do it.

For The King II is challenging, motivating, and that's precisely why it's so damn good.

Like a lot of games, I have really mixed feelings about this one, so the negative review might change. But seeing the same issues called out in 2023 reviews still present now doesn’t make me confident it will.

The fundamentals are great. It’s largely the same as For the King with a few meaningful additions:
-Party size up to 4
-New campaigns, items, loadouts
-Pets and hireable mercenaries

I played the two campaigns on easy difficulty just to test it and get familiar. The pacing is a little bit off, it feels like you don't get much of an opportunity to really explore the world. It's still fun, I think it goes on the list of games that made a sequel that's basically the first one with a facelift.

UI

A lot of my issues are with the UI, and the negative comments about it are honestly spot on. Some of it is unbelievably basic like seeing whose turn it is on the world map. If you’re in clouds or certain backgrounds it’s borderline invisible. The battle camera angles are also wild. Sometimes it’s fine, other times you’re behind your party and can barely see anything, then it snaps back to a side angle. It doesn’t add much besides making it harder to understand what’s happening. Sometimes you can't even see enemies in the back row.

Important information often isn’t surfaced clearly. The battle loot screen has a nice “what’s equipped” UI, but it only really helps with weapons. It would be far more useful if it showed armor and other equipment cleanly too.

Tooltips are the worst part. They give too little information, and the game constantly makes you click deeper or go searching. Example: Tactics. My Fallen Knight had it, and the encyclopedia entry said: “Chance to apply Attack Up on a tile in Combat at the end of turn.” Every time it procced it was on a random tile which I thought was just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ RNG (which I'll get to in a second). Turns out, if you click further into the entry in the encyclopedia it says, “Applies Attack Up to a random empty Combat tile”.

Why? Why would you not just put one word in the main entry, why did I need to click into the entry to see that?

There are also smaller frustrating changes/choices with things like healing or pass in dungeons that applies to the entire party which I'm pretty sure were different in the first game.

Gameplay

Gameplay is still fun and mostly the same, with the additions of the 4-person party, pets, and mercenaries. RNG also feels more heavy-handed and skewed toward negative outcomes, especially on the world map, new encounters and rolls seem to punish you more often than not. Maybe that improves with better gear, but early on it’s frustrating.

The RNG seems way off generally. In multiple fights both parties of 6-8 would whiff, dodge, or miss every attack for multiple turns. I thought I was losing my mind at one point when nothing happened for like 4 turns.

Exploration feels awful. It seems like the game wants you to split up into mini-parties with pets and mercenaries, which isn’t how I want to play. Pets are a great addition but poorly supported: not much info, only curable with kibble, not revivable, and generally hard to track. I couldn't find any way to interact with them, heal them (beyond kibble) or do anything with them beyond just existing. There's also an obnoxious bug in some fights where a random animal will start with 1 HP, if you reload it, it goes back to normal.

I haven’t even really touched mercenaries because by the time I have enough gold to hire them, the run is basically over.

That ties into the bigger issue: the pace is way too fast, and I wish there were more customization options. I hate when an exploration/adventure game forces you into one “correct” playstyle. Most of the time when something appears on the map, I start moving toward it only for it to disappear before I arrive. It’s even worse when weather debuffs hit and RNG gives you 1 move for the day, and then you get a Scourge event miles away on top of it.

Overall, I think the game is fun. I bought it on a deep discount and feel fine about that, but I wouldn’t pay full price. It’s disappointing that this far after release the UI is still terrible, and the main improvements seem to be more DLC rather than fixing core problems.

Avid fan of the original and I do appreciate some of the changes made and the attempts at innovating on the original time based objective game modes and segment them into smaller missions
I ultimately can't decide if this was the best decision for the series