Knights of Pen & Paper

"Knights Of Pen And Paper" is a satirical take on an RPG. It is stylised as a Dungeons and Dragons game, so your friends sit at a table (up to 5), all role-playing as various classes, with a Dungeon Master facing them who describes the story and events. The story is basic and uninteresting, but there's a few smiles with the Pop-culture references.

The gameplay is very simple and ideal for a mobile device. It's a case of reading text and clicking on buttons. The combat is turn-based, so you can take your time and simply tap to select attacks and targets.

The mission types all play out the same, so the game overall is very simple and repetitive. It's just a case of going to a town by tapping the location, taking part in several battles, then going back to the previous city.

The interesting thing about the battles is that you can choose how many enemies to fight at once. You may be tasked with fighting 10 rats, but you could make it easy by fighting ten battles, one rat at a time if you wish. You do get extra rewards for opting for the higher difficulty though.

Each character has 4 abilities which you can spend a point to improve when you level up. You can invest in new weapons/armour at the blacksmith, buy or find items to equip, or buy equipment for your room. Swapping out your table, door, decorations etc. give you various bonuses. Food give you a temporary boost with a time limit (I never bothered with these though).

You always need to make sure you have gold, since you need it to purchase items, revive characters, and travel between places.

I thought the game was quite difficult early on as you constantly need to heal, so I was resting often, or using healing items. During the mid-game, I had invested in advantageous decorations and found some decent items that auto-healed; so during the late-game it actually seemed a little easy. I'd imagine some players may find this game very difficult if they don't make the correct choices.

The extra content was a bit mixed. Some missions were easy, whereas others had a huge difficulty spike where I needed to grind out a few levels and raise money to upgrade my equipment.

When using the blacksmith, you have to pay for the equipment but have a chance of success (I think it started around 40%), so you need to pump money into it and have a bit of luck. For this reason, I ignored this feature until midway through the game, as it seemed a better investment in items for your room, or purchasing the equipable items.

I'm not sure how long the game took to complete but I think it was a little too long for a simple game like this. If it was shorter I would be more inclined to play again using the extra roles you unlock while playing, and using the ones I didn't choose to play as.