9 Kings Early Access review: Blood for the Blood King

From the beautiful magnificence of Songs of Silence to the strategic excellence of Mechabellum, we live in a Golden Age for auto-battlers — one that’s about to get even brighter with the arrival of 9 Kings.

Developer Sad Socket fused automatic combat with elements from roguelite deck-builders and city-builders, creating a formula that looks deceptively simple on the surface and yet harbors a great deal of depth. You start a run with nine empty plots and put your main building down first. From there, it all depends on your draws, as all buildings, troops, and upgrades for your town are represented by cards. You can somewhat steer your starting hand as you unlock perks by leveling up, but 9 Kings is mostly about adapting on the fly, working with what the game throws at you.

There are ways to influence what you might get, though. Every turn – represented as one year inside the game – ends with one of the other kings or rebels from your faction attacking you. In battle, you have no control over your troops (with a single exception): They form up and fight, following their in-built targeting priorities and behaviors. After each battle, you’ll get to choose one card from the spoils and that card will come from the faction you just fought, meaning that you’ll have to fuse the tools of your enemies with your own to overcome them. 

At certain points you’ll get to declare war and make peace with one of your rivals, allowing you to access as well as eliminate a source of cards based on your need. But you’ll need to balance your card needs with other considerations: Some kings are simply very good at countering one particular playstyle and these moments are a great opportunity to get rid of a rival that’s giving you trouble.

Influencing that card pool is vital, since – as you can imagine – randomly placing whatever you get in your town won’t go well for very long. Laying out your city in the optimal way to get what other roguelites would call a build for your current run is the meat of the game. Naturally, every card has certain effects. Some come in the form of adjacency bonuses, so they boost the stats of units or towers next to them. Others provide city-wide effects. Others consume troops every turn to trigger some effect. Even troops can have special interactions when placed next to other units.

For example, the Nature King’s boars are regular melee attackers when placed by themselves. Put them next to another unit, however, and that unit can mount the boars in battle, which nets them a speed boost as well as bonus damage based on the boars’ maximum HP.

These effects can completely transform your units. Your slow-moving, armored paladins might become quick damage dealers when paired with the boars, though the most fun combo I’ve had with them was mounting ballistas on them — boarlistas, if you will. Your thieves – delicate units jumping into the enemy’s backlines to wreak havoc before they inevitably die – might turn out to be super tanky if provided with several stacks of steel coats that negate hits. Your tanky defenders might be turned into walking bombs by equipping them with the carnage ability, which makes them go boom upon death, dealing damage based on their maximum HP.

The amount of potential combinations and synergies between all the different kings is endless. You might think that getting access to your enemies’ cards would make runs feel samey after a while, but that hasn’t been my experience.

Obviously, every king starts with different cards, influencing your playstyle for a run right from the start — even more so once perks are in play, allowing you to begin the game with certain buildings already placed in your town. Most importantly, though, every king’s main structure provides you with a unique skill.

The King of Nature, for example, has an area-of-effect heal he can cast. This, of course, steers you towards an HP-based style. The King of Stone, on the other hand, places towers in battle, making you focus on increasing tower damage and drawing combat out as long as possible.

So while you may find the same cards from run to run, the ones that are useful to you and the combinations you strive for will be vastly different depending on the king you’ve chosen. Seven kings are available during Early Access: The King of Nothing, The King of Magic, The King of Greed, The King of Blood, The King of Stone, The King of Nature, and The King of Progress. Three more will be added on the road to full release, representing a massive expansion of potential combos.

9 Kings is very good at representing a certain fantasy and playstyle with each of these kings. Take the King of Blood, who’s a mix of typical demon and necromancy aspects. You can build demon altars, which spawn a small number of elite units that grow stronger over the course of the run depending on how many of your own units die, so you’ll want to combo that with units that have a high troop count and fall easily, like imps or bombers. You know what’s even better? If you place your imps and bombers next to a cemetery, they get resurrected as imps, enabling them to spill their blood once more and power your demons up a second time. And let me tell you, they grow fat. They get chonk. Literally. As the run progresses, the sprites representing your demons get bigger until they eventually cover half your army with their presence and they simply eat up entire enemy armies.

Random blessings to tiles in your town, wandering merchants, and consistent expansion give you further options throughout a playthrough. At certain intervals, you can also choose from a pool of buffs, which can send your run into overdrive. As the King of Blood, I once drew a buff that transformed units summoned by buildings from imps to bombers, allowing my cemetery as well as a tower I stole from the King of Progress – it usually transforms enemies into lab rats – to create the exploding troops in the middle of my foes’ armies. Blood for the Blood King, baby!

Sad Socket does a lot with its pixel art visuals to transport the spectacle, such as sizing up units and having damage numbers cover everything to represent the carnage. Despite their simplicity, the visuals do a great job of giving each faction some personality and providing vital information, such as by visually representing unit upgrades.

There are drawbacks, though: Once hundreds of units are involved and damage numbers cover the carnage like a blizzard, you have no way of spotting anything. Usually, that’s fine. But for the King of Greed, that’s a problem. This king’s ability allows him to insta-kill any unit and hitting one colored gold earns him extra cash — which is vital for most of his units and buildings. This is easy enough at the start, but at a certain point it becomes impossible to spot the marked units and get anything of worth from this ability, making it feel really underwhelming.

I’d like to see a bit more diversity in enemy armies as well. As it stands, each king you face can’t make use of the same combos and synergies you do — they simply get template forces of their own faction. Of course, this is something of a necessity for balance reasons, making them a bit more predictable so you can plan around them, but it’d be fun if they could blindside you from time to time somehow, forcing you to scramble and think outside of the box to counter them.

Although the game informs you about the damage dealt by each troop and building, it fails to do the same for healing, making it difficult to say how effective your ability as the King of Nature is being used. This is especially crucial as one of the potential buffs you can choose swaps the king’s ability from an area-of-effect heal to an area-of-effect damage field. But how can I make a good decision about that, if I don’t know how vital or nonvital my healing actually is to my units. It might simply be a display bug, as the King of Magic’s healing spire does show you how much it heals each battle.

Bugs, in general, are very much something the developers have to work on, because there are still several on the loose that essentially brick any run they appear in. The King of Progress has a mothership you can actively control (that sole exception to the rule) and one of the possible buffs for it doubles the range of its attacks — on paper. In practice, it stops the unit from doing anything, so you can kiss your run goodbye. Some towers simply stop functioning at random points, which I’ve had happen with both the King of Greed’s coin dispenser and the King of Stone’s flamethrower turret.

This is all the more exacerbated by the fact that save games currently seem busted. Whenever I load up a save, the game takes me to some turn before my actual save point and throws me into an empty battle that can’t be won or lost. That’s the kind of stuff you have to expect to encounter and eventually see fixed during Early Access, so not a massive deal at this point. 

Much more important is that Sad Socket has already nailed the core formula in terms of making it fun, engaging, and satisfying to play — it’s been ‘just one more run’ for me consistently since I got access and I have a feeling I’ll spill yet more blood for the Blood King in the future.

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