One of the most heavily advertised mobile games around, King's Choice lets you manage a fantasy kingdom. Level up your knights, make important domestic decisions, and customize characters to build your dream nation.
King's Choice is the quintessential freemium mobile game. It's not quintessential in that it's necessary to play, nor is it a game that has a great deal of cultural or aesthetic significance. Instead, it's the precise center of the freemium mobile game trend. It's a game that's almost entirely devoid of gameplay, with plenty of pay-to-win mechanics, slow tasks that must be checked daily, and a manufactured aesthetic that puts drawings of attractive people on screen at all times. In other words, if you've played any other freemium mobile game (and there are lots), you've already got a very good idea of what King's Choice is all about.
Your job in King's Choice is to manage a kingdom. You do this through a series of periodic multiple-choice events, lots of resource management, and the occasional battle scene. To do battle, you simply send your men to run headfirst into some enemy men, and whichever side is better upgraded or has more numbers wins. In other words, King's Choice consists almost entirely of clicking through prompts and hitting buttons. You make decisions, sure, but this is essentially a multiple-choice quiz with some wiggling art of lads and ladies tacked on top.
Unlike a quiz from school, however, you can only do a few things each day in King's Choice. You can pay real money to get around this limitation, of course, but without spending, your daily playtime will be sharply limited, especially after you've advanced in the main quest. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it means that you won't get burned out from grinding King's Choice too hard, but it does mean that you're not going to fill all of your idle time with the game.
The art and music in King's Choice are very well-polished. It's got a western fantasy art style with some atypical influences that help set it apart. Many of the game's characters and themes seem like they're right out of Game of Thrones or other fantasy media. Your heirs, lovers, and other important characters tend to be lovingly rendered, with just enough animation to highlight their extreme attractiveness. Unlike some other games, however, you won't be able to bring these characters into battle. Instead, they're part of a larger resource management game in which you attempt to make your kingdom as robust and strong as possible.
When it first launched, King's Choice was lauded by players for having a fairly free-to-play friendly model. These days, sentiments have turned. The current consensus is that King's Choice is growing harsher for players who don't want to spend lots of money. It's getting more and more difficult to keep up, meaning low-spending players are quitting or swiping their credit cards. If you decide that you want to check out the game, be sure to take an honest look at your finances beforehand and set a sane spending limit. If you find yourself feeling like you need to go past this limit, uninstall the game.
It's easy to be incredibly critical of King's Choice for two reasons. First of all, the game has a massive marketing budget, with online advertisements found just about everywhere. It's a polished, high-budget game, but it's not the best thing ever (like the advertisements claim). Second, and perhaps more importantly, it's a very tepid take on a style of game that's already saturated the market. There are probably a dozen games just like King's Choice that you can play, and that's only if you count very close analogs. Legend of Empress, King's Raid, Call Me Emperor, Legend of Phoenix, and more are all very, very similar. King's Choice may be better than all of those games, but it's tough to take it seriously when it's one of a giant crowd.