Reigns: Her Majesty

Reigns is a kingdom management simulation presented as a card game, with a Tinder-like interaction system. You are presented with a situation and either swipe right or left to choose between options. In Her Majesty, you play as the Queen (you played as a King in the previous game).

These decisions will affect the four attributes that represent the situation; Religion, People, Army, and Economy. You need to make sure these meters do not deplete to zero or max out, otherwise your reign will end; usually meet some kind of deathly demise.

When your reign ends, you play as the next Queen, with some decisions carrying over. Although you strive to last as long as possible, there's not that much urgency or consequence of death, so I never felt a strong connection to my character. As you reach certain milestones, your deck expands with new scenarios, but you will often be presented with familiar choices.

Although it does show you which attributes are affected by your decisions, you don't know if it is positive or negative. You would think the effect would be obvious given the proposition, but there's plenty of scenarios where I didn't understand the effect.

When the game is text-based and centres on decisions, I expect the writing to be perfect. The previous game “Reigns” suffered from sometimes having statements (not questions) but giving you Yes/No options. This game is much better in that regard, but now it suffers more by the effects not really matching up with the question. In this game, you are a Queen rather than the King like in “Reigns”, and you don’t seem to be the one making the big decisions. The questions seem more like casual chats, therefore your statements should have a smaller impact. The scenarios are less interesting than Reigns, and often the effects are much larger than they should be. This makes a huge negative impact on the game.

The first “Reigns” was basic but I thought with the correct tweaks, then it can be a good game. The changes have made things worse.

There are items that you acquire throughout the game. Although there were hints/instructions where you should use this item, when I returned to the game a few days later, I struggled to remember what the items were for. If you try to use them at the wrong time, you are penalised by your attributes increasing/decreasing which doesn’t make sense. It’s easy to end the game just by using an item at the wrong time.

You wouldn’t expect any performance issues with a simplistic game like this, but there were times where it seemed to temporarily freeze.

I think you are really only gonna get a couple of hours from the game before you have basically seen everything the game has to offer. I like the simplicity, but the flaws in the writing really hold it back.