For The King II

Mixed reviews are fairly accurate considering they changed the combat significantly, changed the artstyle too much and basically released an early access as an "official release" but as someone with way too many hours in FTK1 this is still a good game worth playing. Biggest upgrade has been the different weapons for each stat, especially vitality weapons being useful.

The devs have kept at FTK2 and show they're putting in the time and care to make it even better. I'm having a blast playing through the campaigns so far with 3 of my friends. I don't mind it being split up into smaller missions all that much. To me, it just feels like what a sequel should be--it looks better, has good variety and some new mechanics that work, all while still keeping the heart and soul of the OG game in mind.

Great game to play with your friends. Very similar to the original, but I think I like how this one plays more.

While not as polished as the first one, at its core it's more of the same with a fresh coat of paint and some new ideas. I've enjoyed playing it as couch co-op.

Fantastic blend of rogue like, turn based RPG, and board game. Several QOL improvements over the first installment (which is also great) Combat takes a bit to master, but overall great experience.

Not bad. Took a little while to figure out some of the mechanics. Playing co-op makes it better.

Why I've never made a review for this game is beyond me but OH MY GOD does it ever deserve one. A group of friends and I first discovered FTK1 because of gamepass and it immediately became a staple of our gaming sessions. Long before the sequel, "FTK Sundays" had become a tradition where we all knew that if it was Sunday, be on at 11am and we're playing For The King so write off your afternoon. Years later and here we are, playing the sequel, and FTK Sundays are still going strong. FTK2 took everything good about the original and added to it. It's probably my favourite coop game ever made in all honesty. Looking forward to the content coming and I'm still happily replaying the content that exists because no two campaigns ever go the same. As for the devs themselves, you guys are awesome. You listen to feedback, you're active in your community, and you guys genuinely seek to continually refine and improve the player experience. Iron Oak doesn't just make one of my favourite games, they're one of my favourite devs. If you're on the fence about this game, just do it. At worst you do the currently 5 campaigns and the endless dungeon mode and move on and you get about 60 or 70 hours of content. But if you're like us, you'll replay the campaigns because last time you didn't find the guy you needed to unlock a new class. Or a new location or cosmetic. Or you wanna see what happens if you make a different choice at a crossroads decision mid campaign. There's no microtransactions in this game. If there's a cosmetic you really want, you're gonna have to play and unlock it. And if there's something you don't have unlocked but your friends do well congrats, you all share your progress as long as you're lobbied up together. Stop thinking about it and just buy it. It's wprth it.

the good: no DLCs that is an absolute miracle now days the bad: the attacks are way too inconsistent, it is really annoying for a strategy game to not do what i expect it to do. i did manage to fix it with cheat engine to force the game to be more consistent but it was really annoying edit: i was wrong there is a system that allows you go get more consistantcy. this game is actually really fun

The only negative aspect of the FOR THE KING series is that each mission ends with no way to carryover your characters to another--still, the rest of the game is soon amazing that you begin to be able to overlook the aforementioned oddity. The LORE system keeps you wanting to play for new characters to try and since you have to make new ones every save game or mission or campaigning event i.e. mission--well it all works out. Most games predecessors as in with sequels beget forgetting the first, but with this series I'd buy BOTH.

Solid second part of the game. Most of the release bugs have been fixed and issues are rarely encountered. Just enough addition to the first games formula to keep it entertaining for another 100+ hours, especially in multiplayer

It's a game that starts off fun and just becomes more and more of a chore in each successive chapter. Bigger grid areas forcing you to traipse across empty areas mindlessly, becomes having to walk across every single tile to find one guy before he's killed. All while more and more scourge effects are piled on top of you: acid squares, dark clouds, enemies can resurrect, etc. Their only approach to difficulty is also to make each area more of an endurance test, every enemy gets progressively higher and higher amounts of armour and resistance making the fights take forever, the enemy gets increasingly BS attacks such as weapon/armour steal (you don't get them back at the end of the fight) or bosses that can spend the entire fight stacking dodge, protection and evasion only to flee meaning you wasted all that time for nothing. To say nothing of how the roguelite elements make it even more annoying, finally getting some good equipment after doing loops of every shop/dungeon/night market on the map and finally enjoying yourself in combat. Only to then beat the level boss and lose all your stuff. Why not let me keep it and progress to the next chapter with my stuff and only lose it if I die? To say nothing of all the other little bugbears, what is the point of having individual inventories? You can't swap items during or after combat, only when you're next to each other in the overworld. Adding another chore to the list when you just want to buy something or hand over the sword you found to your blacksmith. Just have one big inventory for all the characters! Status ailments can't be removed by resting, teammates can only join you in combat if they're within anything from 1-3 tiles (so why even bother letting everyone move independently?) Certain enemies being able to "scare" your character/s and you can't cure them so you're stuck waiting for them to either flee or just skip the turn until the status effect wears off, certain effects in the overworld (acid squares) can delete your gear, the RNG resulting in you arriving at the shop before the final boss with 2k gold and no health items for sale, just inferior gear and finally the random bugs where you have to ALT+F4 because you can't exit during combat, but no one can take a turn. What have they been doing for the last 2 years if not patching bugs and fixing these issues? Tl;dr they made a fun game and then did everything they could to bury it beneath annoying and tedious crap

very buggy, but looking past the development and network issues, it's an incredibly fun game to play with friends. Simplistic D&D online board game, what's not to love?

Bought this game at a sale, cus me and my friends loved the first one. Would be good, even great but the glitches, the wonkyness make it a nightmare to play. The game itself feels very unfinished and I would even say feels like an early access. You get thrown loot at your face all the time, so buying items from the shops feel useless cus you get it in the next chest either way. The fights seem easy, with too big damage numbers. I feel bamboozled, scammed, hurt and most importantly betrayed.

It would be a goated game IF it had more enjoyable content than bugs, dark carnival is basically unplayable, gold quests are at best mediocre AND bugy as fck, RNG is non-existent, compared to FTK 1 everything is worse and THIS flaming piece of garbager should be its better version, last but not least FUCK mimics, hope both sides of their pillow are scorhing. Ty for coming to my TedTalk, gn. I'm going to hang myself.

Very fun game Enjoying every character Would like if there was a way to remove useless followers Also Dark Book very OP, those random skelly that you summon are very good

Super fun! Last week a friend organised a tournament style "race" to see how far we could get into the Dark Carnival mode. We were given the choice to control 1 character or all 4. I appreciate how versatile this game is, allowing the player to use 1 or 4 characters at a time really changes the game-play in an interesting way. My overall thoughts about FTK2 are very positive. It's fun, challenging, and acquiring strong items feels very rewarding. On the flip side, it did feel like if you missed some of those stronger equips, buying them was very costly in the store. Great improvement over FTK 1, so much fun!

the game is an alright version of round based dnd inspired combat. the story is not interesting and i would not recommend playing solo. The most fun comes from the multiplayer with friends. also their UI is pretty bad.

the game builds a lot on the original game and a lot feels streamlined. I do struggle to understand all of the rules sometimes, but overall this is an approachable game with friends. I recommend playing with people you know rather than strangers.

Its honestly kinda crazy that this game has mixed reviews. This is far from a traditional roguelike but is super fun to play and engage with. Im getting back into now and I did the first chapter with my friend in 6.5 hours (this is longer than it should take lmao) and its some of the most fun I've had gaming in ages. This game just has a lot of little quirks and flavor that allows you to make your own fun on top of the actual content. Its supposed to emulate a TTRPG and I think it does a fantastic job of doing so. By far my favorite part is giving my characters a fun name and seeing what trends emerge in their character throughout a run to give them a personality. This game is 100% worth the price and will give you a solid couple days worth of playtime. Its a great successor to the first game and builds on it in a very fun and engaging way. The biggest gripe I have is that the rng seems to just absolutely hate me sometimes but thats just how it goes, overall its challenging in a very rewarding way despite the rng and if you play well you will succeed. I highly recommend you play this with a friend.

Expands on the gameplay of the original in ways that make sense and add an extra layer of strategy to each fight. Sometimes the dice rolls don't go your way in such a fashion that you start to believe the game is messing with you though, and with some monsters having traits that make attacks miss unless they're 100% accurate it can lead to a few frustrating moments. I'm not yet sure how to feel about the scenarios all being linked into a single tale, when the original had each campaign tackle an individual, unrelated threat but I am looking forward to tackling them all the same.

I wasn't sold when the game first came out, but man the devs have been making the game better with every update, and I'm really enjoying it!

I played the first game, and I've enjoyed this game just as much as the first one. Lots of fun

My fav game, I miss the old Dark Carnival, so fun making the reflections op

It is quite enjoyable and a good time. Its a bit hard but you learn more and more each time. if you take the time to play and learn its a lot of fun and has just enough story and rouge like aspects that's just my style. More fun with friends and just a chill good time. :)

If you loved FTK 1, this is just more of it and I am glad they made it. Launch was definitely buggy but it is much better now.

It's great to play with friends! It allows up to 3 other player and makes it even more fun. basically it is a turn base game and as your trying to level, loot, and survive you're also being hit by debuffs and an ever decreasing timer. you have to strategize with your friends to win or get destroyed off of the RNG rolls. but even when you lose you still gain things like lore books which you can use in a shop to further increase your chance at survival. Though it's no miracle worker so even with it you may still die immediately if you dive to far into the enemies territory. Anyways, fun game. Oh! and you don't need friends to play or even a full lobby. you can play all four characters yourself or split the characters amongst whoever is playing.

Game is great. Only con so far is that the party does not continue on to the next chapter. I can jam with that though.

The game is slow moving, difficult to understand (lots of trial and error to see what happens because there's so little explanation), and full of bugs. It's charming to an extent and a pass time but it's a game you'll play once through and probably never again, be frustrated many times, but come back to for the need to complete it.

Amazing game, way better then the first one. 10/10 would recommend to anyone.

- Balance/Progression/Dialogs/UI are all shit, most of the problems from the 1st game have migrated here - 80% of the content from the first game, also some mechanics became only worse after rework - New mechanics with field positioning is too hard to use in current state, so most of the time you won't use it. It's one of the biggest changes to the game, and it's just not working Summary: Game feels like easy money for low development price, since everything was just re-used with almost no new content

Awful game, just awful. It's exactly the same as For the King (1). The game's difficulty relies on being stupidly unfair (e.g., losing 80% of your health in one hit at level 0) instead of offering real challenges through thoughtful game design. Avoid this game — it's a waste of time and money.

After two years since release the game is finally enjoyable. Now it's proper sequel! Well done, guys. I'm glad I've kept my faith in you

the game is good and fun to play with Friends so please fix your connection issue

Same as the first one, but with an ugly UI and worse performance.

You lose your characters and inventory after every chapter, starting over for every next chapter of the campaign. This is not my kind of RPG !!

I was elated to play the sequel to the beloved game For The King that me and my fellow goblin-loving friends have dumped many hours and maybe even lifetimes into. Our love for the goblin skin and other cosmetics, mostly the goblin skin, drove us to dedicate our time to For The King II. So imagine our disappoint when we learned it was locked behind an nearly impossible to beat difficulty, however, our love for the goblin skin drove us to push through. We faced many horrors like never ending waves of enemies that would single target a party member killing them turn one or getting the worst RNG rolls that would make even GTA V speedrunners cry. After many failed attempts and even using save-scumming to try to save good runs, we had to give up our hopes and dreams at having our beloved goblin skin. It amazed us at how such a vital cosmetic as the goblin skin would be locked behind a challenge only the most dedicated of players could obtain. This is one of the many issues we faced in our runs of For The King II. Nothing is better than all objectives spawning on opposite sides of the map, the slowest ship traveling we've ever experienced in a game, picking the coolest sounding route for the final chapter only to have our HEARTS CRUSHED, facing full boards of enemies that are ALL IMMUNE to everything, having crucial time-based objectives being hidden in the farthest crevices of the map, having runs end to factors out of our control, and NOT BEING ABLE TO SIMPLY BUY THE GOBLIN SKIN. Oh but thank goodness the Dark Carnival, a mode that magnifies all the worst aspects of this game, is getting all the love from it's parents. We are still missing a lot of the mode variety that made the original For the King so fun and replayable. It's a shame that a game of this nature is only beatable using "optimal" routes as the RNG and rouge-like aspects could've been very fun. And even when we managed to reach THE QUEEN, we had to deal with waves of enemies that made quick work of us since they were allowed to abuse focus and busted attacks. Since the last session of For The King II with my goblin-skin-lovers, we have all been checked into a mental asylum and have been scheduled for lobotomies to forget the goblin skin ever existed. Do I hate this game personally? No. I want to see it become the best it can be (Game of the Year and Goblin Game of the Year). Is it fun? Not really unless you're ready to pour entire generations worth of time to even have a sliver of a chance at beating this game at the harder difficulties. Instead you will find me drooling over the goblin skin in For The King in all it's polygonal glory.

Been a longtime fan of FTK. Lots of really good changes were made in the past few updates. Keep up the good work :)

I have close to 100 hours on the first game, and almost 50 on this one. Anotha one!

It's improved a lot since the initial buggy release, and the developers are constantly updating with more content and bug fixes. Worth it if you enjoy turn-based combat and fun to play with friends.

This is a slower game with turn based combat. The story of both For the King I and II is great.

With the recent sale, bringing it down to 10€, it's completely worth it. The roadmap was just released, teasing a few new free characters, a dlc, and some other paid stuff. (Also if you own FTK1, you can get the game for 9€ instead of 10€). Right now is the absolute perfect time to buy it, because, despite it's tough launch, the game is finally heading in the right direction. Been a fan of FTK1 for half a decade, and i can't recommend this enough, especially with the sale.

For The King II, developed by IronOak Games and released in late 2023, is a compelling follow-up to the original title, expanding its distinctive blend of tabletop-inspired roguelike mechanics and turn-based strategy. Returning players will find themselves once again in the troubled land of Fahrul, this time under the shadow of Queen Rosomon’s tyrannical rule. The sequel embraces the core elements that made the first game stand out—procedurally generated maps, dice-based actions, and turn-based encounters—but elevates the formula with a broader strategic scope, enhanced visual style, and a reworked combat system that significantly deepens the tactical gameplay. The most immediately noticeable improvement is the game’s shift to a grid-based combat system. Unlike the more simplified battle mechanics of the original, For The King II introduces unit positioning and terrain considerations, creating a new layer of tactical depth. Placement now matters—ranged units are vulnerable if exposed, and flanking becomes a viable tactic. Each class, from Alchemists and Blacksmiths to newer additions like Hunters and Scholars, feels distinct, with varied abilities and synergies that encourage experimentation. While there’s room for even more differentiation between them, the expanded options make for much richer party-building and combat strategy. Exploration remains central to the game’s appeal. The world map is procedurally generated each run, ensuring replayability with unexpected encounters, weather effects, and biome diversity. Players move their party across hex-based tiles, managing resources, triggering random events, and preparing for the unpredictable with careful equipment planning and Focus point management. While the luck-based nature of encounters can sometimes feel punishing—especially when a few bad rolls undo careful planning—the systems in place do provide tools to mitigate randomness. The game’s balance between deterministic strategy and chaotic luck is still one of its most distinctive features. In terms of structure, For The King II adopts a chapter-based campaign mode, telling a larger, interconnected story across five distinct acts. This gives the game a stronger narrative framework than its predecessor, though the storytelling itself can feel serviceable rather than memorable. Missions often follow familiar RPG tropes—retrieve items, defeat bandits, solve local mysteries—but the procedural nature of the game means these objectives often play out differently each time. The roguelite progression system allows failed attempts to feed into future runs through unlockable characters, items, and lore, giving a satisfying sense of long-term growth. Presentation-wise, the game is charming and cohesive. The art style retains its low-poly aesthetic but is more refined, with vibrant colors, smoother animations, and expressive character models. Environments are beautifully rendered, from snowy mountain passes to burning wastelands, and the accompanying soundtrack strikes a good balance between atmospheric and adventurous. Though not groundbreaking, the music and sound effects create a welcoming fantasy tone that suits the game’s blend of whimsy and peril. Multiplayer remains a core strength, allowing up to four players to embark on a shared adventure. Cooperative play is well-implemented, and coordinating party roles and movements with friends enhances both the strategic and social experience. Solo players are not left behind, as the AI-controlled party setup works well, though juggling multiple characters can occasionally lead to pacing slowdowns. Performance-wise, some early issues like long load times and occasional crashes have been addressed through post-launch patches, though the interface can still feel sluggish, particularly during large battles or online sessions. Ultimately, For The King II builds upon its predecessor in meaningful ways. The introduction of grid-based combat transforms encounters into true tactical challenges, while the game retains the accessible charm and unpredictability that defined the original. It’s not without flaws—its narrative is thin, some UI elements need polishing, and class variety could be pushed further—but as a cooperative strategy RPG with roguelike structure, it offers a satisfying and deeply replayable experience. Fans of tactical games, fantasy adventures, and tabletop-inspired design will find For The King II a worthy, and often thrilling, journey through chaos and challenge. Rating: 7/10

really cool game, new to the genre, but i got hooked. 55 hours later and i finished the campaign! pretty simple but very fun. even 24.99 seems like a good deal

This was very fun for four players in couch coop.

An amazing game, great follow up to the first.

love this game me and the ol lady play it together

dont bother, just play ftk 1. this is hot garb

Fun with friends

Challenging but rewarding

Really fun for the price