Review: Hold Your King
- Guilherme Ribeiro
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
The king needs your help. Hold the king back!
THE GAME
Hold Your King is a cooperative platform game developed by Next Big Game Studio and distributed by UGC90, Joygame, and Gamersky Games. After being attacked and thrown out of his castle, the king needs the help of his subjects to return to his throne. Using a stretcher, place his majesty on it and carry him through the various obstacles in his path, preventing the king from falling or getting angry.
MY IMPRESSIONS
The craze for cooperative and funny games seems endless. Interesting ideas are always popping up, some even using existing concepts in different ways. Hold Your King uses coordination between two players as the basis for its gameplay. Balancing the king on the stretcher might seem simple, but the king himself won't let it be that easy. He moves (and even hits you) if he's irritated by the constant bumping or dragging that players might cause him to arrange the royalty on the stretcher. It's important not to irritate the king too much. That in itself will be a constant challenge on the journey. Furthermore, coordination for jumping and moving the stretcher between players will be extremely important. Combining these two factors will lead to funny, irritating, and desperately hilarious situations.
The game is in Brazilian Portuguese, but the game text is of little importance to the course of the journey. It's important to remember that, at the time of this review, Hold Your King only works when played in cooperative mode, and both players need a copy of the game because, unlike many cooperative games, this one cannot be played locally, largely because it allows players to use both first-person and third-person perspectives. Keep this in mind when playing, but if you don't have a friend, the game has an option to find someone to play with. It's a game with just the right amount of fun and challenge that will generate plenty of laughs with your friends.
ACHIEVEMENTS
If balance and coordination between you and a friend aren't challenging enough, the achievements will add another layer of difficulty. Aside from achievements based on basic game mechanics, like hitting the king a few times to get him onto the stretcher, or performing specific actions like carrying the stretcher alone, most of the more challenging achievements will be related to the time spent completing the journey, with the hardest being finishing in under an hour. Perhaps achieving 100% of the achievements requires a good companion and plenty of trial and error to optimize gameplay and complete all the challenges presented by the achievements.
CONCLUSION
Despite using a familiar idea, Hold Your King adds mechanics to differentiate itself and, consequently, add another layer of challenge that generates both funny situations and requires players to coordinate in order to progress. Hold Your King does the basics well. Although it doesn't have a local cooperative mode at the time of this review, the developers have stated that they intend to add this mode in future updates, which in my view is something that is missing and should have been included at launch, since the fun of games of this genre is playing with friends and, in the current state of the game, either two people will have to buy a copy of the game or you are forced to play with a stranger, if you can even find someone to play with, which can lead to situations where you can't play for that simple reason. However, just knowing that the developers are paying attention to this is already great and has everything to make the game stand out more.
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