"Reigns" Review

I promise that the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided review exists. It is still being worked on. In the meantime, however, we have Reigns. Reigns is a game primarily for smartphones, though I am made to understand that there is a desktop version as well. It is just $3, and it has an interface that will be familiar to many people. It has kind of been making the rounds around the internet lately through various lets players and online critics, so I figured that I would give it a try. At time of writing, I have completed the story of Reigns, but I haven't gotten every death or completed every objective. This will undoubtedly be the shortest review I've ever written, but this is a fairly simple mobile game that is worth talking about, so it isn't much of a surprise. Just a note before we begin: Every picture used in this review is a screenshot from my phone, so it is going to look a little weird.
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Right off the bat, Reigns is pretty cleverly designed. You see, the entirety of gameplay is decision-making, and how, you might ask, does this mobile game choose to have you make decisions?
By swiping left or right.
Reigns takes a bit of functionality that your average smart phone user is familiar with (regardless of whether or not they have ever used Tinder) and makes it the focal point of gameplay. From a purely business and play testing standpoint, it is pretty ingenious. With that in mind, swiping left and right is the only thing you will be doing throughout Reigns, so there isn't much variety in what you do, but the joy to be found in Reigns is in the results of these swipes.
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In Reigns, you play as either one king who is constantly reincarnated under different names or a bunch of kings from the same line (this is never really made clear. It may in fact be both), and the game is centered around maintaining balance in your kingdom. You have four meters that you need to watch: the church, the people, the army, and the treasury. As you make decisions, these meters will either rise or fall by a certain amount. The game doesn't tell you which direction a meter will go after you make a decision, but as you move the card in the center to the left or right, circles will appear above each meter that this decision will impact. A small circle means that this decision will have a small impact, and a large circle means a large impact. This aids you in your decision making when certain meters are in need of change.
As I've mentioned, the key in Reigns is balance. You obviously don't want any of your meters to run out. If your church is too weak, pagans could take over the kingdom. If your people are too unhappy, they could revolt. If you army is too weak, you could be taken over by a foreign power. If your treasury runs out, wealthy nobleman can take your place. You also, however, don't want any of your meters to go to maximum. As a king, you need all branches of your kingdom to be strong, but you also need them to be dependent on you. This may sound like a simple thing to do, but in practice it requires quite a bit of strategy; a surprising amount, really. There are times where you might make decisions that cause a certain meter to increase or decrease by a little bit every second, and in times like these you have to think both strategically and quickly.
Where the gameplay of Reigns falters is in its "dueling" system. There is a brief tutorial from one of the knight characters, but it isn't very helpful. Having now completed the game, I believe I may know how dueling actually works now, but in the end it just kind of takes away from the experience. It is set up to look kind of like a word battle, but you have all these moves you can use and none of them really seem to do anything, and it just seems like a cheap way to get you to die. The ways that dueling is used in the story could definitely have been handled better.
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The story in Reigns is surprisingly intricate and organic. There is an overarching plot that rears its head every few hundred years, but there is a large amount of organic storytelling that can take place between these moments. In Reigns, you can end up establishing colonies in a new world, having a steamy, passionate affair with a noblewoman that your subjects love but your church hates, being killed in a duel by your heir, starting crusades in search of the holy grail, taking on a sinister conspiracy to depose you, and many other possibilities. Some of these organic storytelling opportunities are objectives, and when you complete them, you get a new title. For example, if your King's name is "William" and you complete an objective wherein you rule for at least five years, you are called "William the Young," or "William the Pure" if you complete an objective that deals with the church. There are 40 such objectives, and each one depends on making the right decisions.
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For all of its value, though, Reigns is obviously not perfect. You essentially have a deck of cards wherein all of the possible choices are held, and since you only get new cards when you meet a new character or make a particularly important decision, the game has the habit of repeating itself quite often. This happens so often, in fact, that within a short amount of time you will just be swiping out of instinct because you have come into certain cards so many times. It is hard to maintain this idea that you are playing as a different king every cycle when you end up having the same conversations over and over.
The same can be said of deaths. There are a total of 26 deaths you can experience, and most of the time these deaths stem from one or more of your meters either running out or getting too strong. That is as it should be, but the fact remains that there just isn't enough variety in the ways you can die by any particular meter. There are plenty of totally different deaths, but they have to be sought out in order to happen, and that kind of defeats the purpose of the gameplay.
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I am not the kind of person who plays mobile games often, but with all the buzz surrounding Reigns, I couldn't help but take a look. It is relatively cheap, just a mere $3 on the app store, and in return for this small price you get some incredible value. Needless to say, the game is not without its faults, but you can still sink a few hours into Reigns and say it was time well spent. In spite of its flaws, Reigns can count on a hearty recommendation from me, so go out and spend the necessary $3.

Let us review:
Constant repetition -1
Poor dueling system -0.4

So, the final score for Reigns is:
8.6/10 - Quite Good
Excellent work, Devolver Digital, excellent work.