romance of the three kingdoms 13 ps4 review

There are menus and submenus, nestled within one another, mapped to all sorts of unintuitive button presses, and flagrantly disregarding some of the most basic rules of interface design (what is the option in the menu you have selected, the one highlighted in black, or the one in white? Have fun figuring that out, and hopefully you don’t wreck your military as you struggle with getting a handle on this extremely basic UI element). 'There are menus and submenus, nestled within one another, mapped to all sorts of unintuitive button presses, and flagrantly disregarding some of the most basic rules of interface design.'Īnd it’s pretty bad, honestly.

This being a console first game means there is little excuse for the interface to be as bad as it is. However, in an era when we have seen games successfully make the jump to consoles with fine tuned interfaces designed to keep things quick and moving, Romance of the Three Kingdoms started life as a PS4 game, and was then ported to PC as well for the western release. To be perfectly fair, strategy games have labyrinthine interfaces, that can be hard to adapt to the limited inputs consoles provide.

The biggest stumble the game makes, in my opinion, is the interface. Indeed, as a long time fan of strategy games, Romance of the Three Kingdoms left me feeling quite cold in a lot of ways. My appreciation for Romance of the Three Kingdoms 14 borders more on academic than anything else. I say thankfully, but that in and of itself should not be construed as an endorsement of quality, or stamp of approval. It’s a rich, unbroken history, but one that the west has flat out not had the chance to experience much – for a confluence of reasons, Romance of the Three Kingdoms games have had few releases outside of Japan.īut the fourteenth (yes, fourteenth) game in the series is available now, and it’s come to the west, thankfully enough. Yet the west has missed out on an extremely prolific chapter in the history of strategy games – Koei’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms series is a turn based strategy and tactics series, going back almost four decades now.

Strategy games using historical settings are nothing new, and turn based strategy games with historical flavors even less so.

Romance of the three kingdoms 13 ps4 review