By all rights, a franchise should get better with each iteration. Even FIFA (sorry, EA Sports FC) gets blasted for making tiny, incremental changes each year, but at least the modern version is unrecognisable from FIFA 96. You improve things over the years, iron out kinks and make a smoother experience.
Royal Roads 3 says ‘nah’ to that. Somehow, after three games in the Royal Roads series, and a double-digit number of releases in other series (Gnomes Garden, Garden City, Roads of Time, etc etc), 8floor Games have managed to release their least impressive game to date. It’s almost impressive. Because Royal Roads 3 is so incredibly dull that we’re lacking the enthusiasm to even review it.
We choose the words ‘least impressive’ carefully, as we’re not quite convinced that Royal Roads 3 is 8floor Games’ worst city-management sim to date. That’s because it is actually reasonably bug-free, something we can’t say about the other games. There are no save issues – at least that we have found – and the UI doesn’t overlap with game components like it does in too many of their games to date. There are some minor quibbles about cursor accuracy, but mostly this is clean as a whistle.
But while Royal Roads 3 is not riddled with bugs, it’s staggeringly dull. Aggressively so. We twice found ourselves headbanging, as our body effectively shut down and said it was time to sleep.
Hopefully you can see what we mean from the screenshots. The world of Royal Roads 3 is drab to say the least. Its favourite colour is brown, which is at least supplemented in the early levels by a touch of green. The problem is, the further you explore into its world, the more brown things become. The narrative wants you to realise that the kingdoms are going to ruin, and that means sucking out all colour.
The other 8floor Games like to shuffle in new buildings, new themes (sometimes new eras) and the odd fantastical creature. Royal Roads 3 does nothing of the sort. It might be a fantastical setting, but it’s stretching the world ‘fantastical’ to the absolute limit. There are some bioluminescent mushrooms and the odd wizard, but it’s mostly all wooden huts propped up in the mud.
Into this setting is tossed the personality-vacuum of Queen Layna. On the Store Card for Royal Roads 3 she’s been cruelly portrayed as a Rami Malek-looking dude, and about as much care has been lavished on her in-game. She crops up between levels to remind you of the story, as she babbles to her adviser about whether they’re close yet. What they’re close to we don’t know. It might be a king, or an artifact or wizard. Perhaps we did fall asleep.
But where the dullness really takes hold is in the levels. It’s the usual format of fifty levels (with added bonus levels, woo!), each housing a single-screen of city management and resource-juggling. Every level plays the same way: you start with a worker’s tent, and a click of the cursor will send that worker to build or demolish something.
The demolishing comes in the form of blockages in the road. Before you can do anything of use, you have to actually reach it, and fallen trees and boulders get in the way. So, you can expend resources to remove those blockages, gaining access to more of the level. That might uncover a ruined sawmill, farm, quarry or mine, which you can spend even more resources on. These doer-uppers generate you resources over time, and the gameplay loop is complete.
What makes Royal Roads 3 the absolute pinnacle of tedium is that the balancing is dire. This isn’t something that the previous 8floor games have got wrong: this is new to Royal Roads 3. Build a sawmill and it will require an absolutely gargantuan number of resources. What this means is that you’re waiting, in real-time, for your various buildings to pump out the items you need. It’s perfectly possible to be sat there for two, three minutes, hovering over a farm and tapping it on the odd occasion that it’s got something to tap on.
But it doesn’t stop there. The time taken to build something is longer too. Your little workers take fifteen, twenty seconds to build what they need to build. This friction has been planed off in the past by a power-up system, where you can periodically speed up movement or production. But, inexplicably, the power-ups are turned off on three-quarters of the levels. They pop in and out of each level as they do an annoying hokey-cokey. Just as you get used to having them, they get ripped away.
There are no buildings that speed up production, at least not in the first two-thirds of the game. Upgrading is equally resource-heavy, meaning that you have to stockpile heavily to build more satisfying sawmills. And when you do, they only offer-up a tiny amount of additional resources. It’s as if someone has looked at the extremely tiresome and longwinded series and thought, yep, what that needs is more waiting.
If there were fancy new buildings or happenings in each level then there would at least have been a carrot dangling in front of our faces. We would have been tempted to play on to see the dragons and airships that lay ahead. But the carrot is made of mud. It’s brown, and it’s the same for every carrot that follows. There’s nothing to look forward to, as every level wheels out the same old buildings, the same old tricks. You can keep your stinking carrots.
Positives? We can offer you one. There is the odd level that offers a clever layout. They mostly come from limitations: you might not have one of the resources to hand, so you have to think about where you’re getting it from. These puzzles are less frustrating than in some of the other, similar games. You’re not restarting because you accidentally used a resource that was needed later. They’re clever in an unobtrusive way, waking you up and making you think for once.
We’ve hate-played games before, but hate is a strong word in the case of Royal Roads 3. It’s more that we persisted in a state of bored disbelief. Surely something interesting is going to happen. Surely we’re going to end up somewhere less brown, rather than more. It’s almost impressive that no, it makes no attempt to do anything of the sort.
Middle of the Road? Royal Roads 3 is creeping into the gutter, and it’s doing it slowly.
