Conqueror 940 AD is a 4x strategy game that touts itself as a “casual turn-based medieval town-builder”, which in theory isn’t a terrible concept. Sometimes I’ve felt the urge to play something like Civilization or Crusader Kings, but I didn’t feel like sitting down for a 6-hour session of trade negotiations, war declarations, and urban planning. So something that’s a bit simpler but still scratches that itch for world domination sounds delightful.
Of course, it all comes down to exactly how simplified and pared-down the process of ruling a digital empire becomes. For Conqueror 940 AD, that process is as easy as pushing a button over and over, which makes me feel less like I’m running a kingdom and more like I’m working at Staples.
You take control of a young prince from the land of Penalia. As the king passes away from old age, your uncle assumes the throne and starts to grow a little paranoid. Worried that his other brothers will want to take over his new kingdom, he has all of his siblings assassinated in rather gruesome ways. However, you manage to see where things are going and escape before you suffer the same fate. You set out to begin your own kingdom and hopefully restore the honor of your family’s name through your leadership.
Aside from that opening cut scene, most of the story is told in small dialogue boxes every so often. The plot is really only there as a framing device to explain why someone as young as you has risen to become the ruler of a small patch of land. You have quite a few assistants who help guide you along the path to becoming a better king and the conversations with them can be amusing. Especially with Lady Alyssa who serves as your catty master of spies and is the only character with any sort of noteworthy personality.
Visually, Conqueror looks quite simplistic. It uses very basic colors and art that look like they could have done by someone with impressive MS Paint skills. The graphics are so low-grade that I bet this could run on a PC that’s still running Windows 98. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though as it did invoke a bit of nostalgia for 90s era PC games. Especially since it also has very rudimentary menus, options, and repetitive looping music. You could have told me that this came on a floppy disk made by Sierra and I’d believe you.
As king, your job is to perform various tasks to allow your kingdom to grow. These choices should be familiar to you if you’ve played any other game in this genre. They include ordering the production of new buildings, researching new technologies, learning new skills to improve your leadership quality, sending emissaries to meet or mess with neighboring kingdoms, trading goods, and recruiting soldiers to your army. These jobs are all accomplished with sliders that can be turned on or off.
Each of these actions has a different effect on your kingdom. Research can unlock new methods to produce more goods or make new buildings. Your emissaries can either create new trading agreements or gather intel on your enemies. The market fluctuates constantly so it may be good to hold off on buying or selling any goods depending on the prices. There’s also some slight dating you can do by courting eligible princesses, although it’s mostly just another slider you can toggle.
In addition to these responsibilities, you have to meet with petitioners who will present problems that need to be dealt with. These can involve issues that need to be addressed around town, visits from rival leaders, or important lessons from your assistants. You’re given three different options to choose from and go with the one that will yield the best result. Your skills or goods can affect the outcome of these scenarios with some options only being available if a certain stat or amount of goods is high enough. A right or wrong solution to the situation can result in you gaining or losing a number of goods or a skill point.
So there are a decent amount of decisions that need to be made. The only problem is that most of them are governed by a gigantic button with an hourglass on it. This button is how you end the day so whatever task you’ve turned on can continue to progress. After a while, it starts to feel like the only bit of gameplay in the entire game.
There’s very little visual stimuli in Conqueror. Every action is performed by moving the sliders. So all you do is make a decision by toggling some of these sliders and then hitting the button. That’s the whole game in a nutshell. Want to research something? Toggle the slider and press the button. Want to trade something? Toggle the slider and press the button. Want to talk to a lovely princess and attempt to start a romantic relationship? Don’t worry, that’s all done with the help of a toggled slider and constant button pressing.
This wouldn’t be so bad except that it can take ages for any of your tasks to complete. Research, productions, learning new skills, and so on require several in-game days of effort. So most of my time with Conqueror was just pressing that damn button again and again. I will admit that when projects finally finished and I gained the ability to produce stone or accumulate more taxes there was a little rush of dopamine. This is definitely a good game for fans of watching numbers go up, but the gameplay itself becomes too monotonous.
Talking to petitioners starts to feel less like you’re helping your subjects and more like you’re choosing the optimal answer to a multiple-choice quiz. Some of these scenarios repeat themselves too, so if you know the right answer you can just spam that and gain some quick rewards. Other choices and gameplay options do open up as you go along, but even the little breaks from the regular routine don’t do enough to make things feel varied.
There are also some technical issues. I had a situation where my research meter turned black for some reason and wouldn’t allow me to research any more subjects relating to my military. Sometimes I couldn’t select a choice with a petitioner because the game said I didn’t have enough resources, even though I clearly did. The text of this game can be infuriatingly tiny. It practically requires a magnifying glass to make out the descriptions for each skill.
I like the idea of creating a title that feels like a less complicated version of Civilization, but it seems easy to create a game that dumbs things down too much. It was hard for me to get immersed in ruling my kingdom in Conqueror 940 AD since the gameplay was so barebones. At times, it almost felt like I was feeling out a spreadsheet rather than ruling a kingdom. It’s possible to take something like Crusader Kings 3 and make it more accessible for a general audience, but Conquerer 940 AD’s buttons and toggles don’t make for an exciting game of political intrigue.
A PC copy of Conqueror 940 AD was provided to TheGamer for this review. Conqueror 940 AD is available on PC.
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