Game of Sultans -- No Spoiler Review

 Game of Sultans

System: Phone 

Price: Freemium (Free to play with in-app purchases available, but not required) 

Voice Acting: None 

ESRB Rating: T (13+) 

Overall Rating: Stole 2/10 ♥s

Pre-Game Perception: Rule a kingdom as a Sultan(ess?) and get to build a harem of men. All the dating ads for the game are ridiculous and I don’t buy them for one moment. I assume it is a choice-based system, though, where you can elevate certain husbands to better husbands?

Morning-After Reflection: Oh boy… It’s a kingdom management game, with energy and 200 types of currency, mini-battles, and no actual romance gameplay. The only VN stories are related to war, and barely VN parts.

Story: “It’s the golden age of the glorious Ottoman Empire, and you’re in charge! As the Sultan or Sultanah, you can fight in incredible battles, experience thrilling love stories with your consorts, nurture your heirs, and guide your Empire to new heights. Relax at the end of a long day of ruling by heading to the new Court Pet Pen, where you can keep your favorite pets!”

Interest Rating: 6/10. The ads looked silly, but being able to backstab and pull political maneuvers to raise your rating in the Ottoman Empire sounded cool. Plus, the picture is of a Sultanah (as I’ve learned they are called now and not Sultaness) so being a woman ruling a Kingdom with “thrilling love stories” also sounded cool. However, I was skeptical, because those ads really are hilariously bad.

MC: When you start the game, you get the option of choosing male or female for the MC. I picked male to mix things up a bit, because often female is the designated choice in the games I play (otome, of course!). You get a few different choices for faces, and I think clothing-- whatever it was it wasn’t that impressive on the dude side of things, so I can’t imagine there’s much more customizable options on the lady’s side. You get to choose a name, and I just randomized that. And then you’re in the game!

Hrm, that’s not much to go off, is it? The game starts right away, the only set-up is that the Sultan has died and you are summoned to pledge to be the best Sultan ever! You’re very gung-ho about this. Your icon that you chose is what appears whenever your character appears on screen, which seems to be… rarely. Only when interacting with other players, I think. Otherwise the game is told from your perspective, so everyone is talking to you. So, yep, that’s it. Your name is never used, no one is voiced, and you have little to no information on who you are except that you apparently get to be the new Sultan/Sultanah. Go forth and rule, or something.

Likability Rating: Fuka. There is no character, so there’s nothing to like. And you get no choice over personality besides deciding one of two options each time you get a choice which basically comes down to what is better for your kingdom? Popularity really doesn’t matter, so be ruthless, or be a philanthropist, you’re still just managing a kingdom.

Plot: You know… there’s probably a plot to this game, but I didn’t find it. To break it down in the easiest terms, you… Um… manage? Any issues you solve as the Sultanah are random, except the battles, which are pre-scripted to literally chase the bad guys through 100s, if not 1,000s of battle levels with little to no pay off and are only there to be a money sink. I guess you could say the goal of the game is to compete with the whales, but I’m a free to play player, and I’m not dropping money on a game knowing it won’t make a dent compared to the big spenders out there. But, yeah, there’s no actual story. Just make a kingdom work, I guess. Gain troops, gain money, train viziers, fight troops, make babies, marry off babies, hunt with pets, but all of it is done with the click of a button and no interaction from you besides telling it to “do”.

Replayability Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ Yeah, it’s that bad. It’s a grind, and really the only point of the game is to continue to grind. There is no ending. There are no replays of decisions. You just play until you’re tired of it, or until… it shuts down, I suppose?

Love Interests: Well, here it is. My favorite part of the game. Absolutely ruined because Game of Sultans doesn’t exactly have love interests. At least not anything that really matters. Your first option in the game is to choose one of two suitors. I was playing a man, so I was presented with two women who were throwing shade at each other. So I picked the shadiest. Turns out that as soon as you do that, the other one’s father promises to ruin your kingdom because they don’t believe you’re the true Sultan. Okay, enemy number one. I assume if you play a woman that you get the same experience, just with men and the mother of the man you don’t choose still doing the same thing.

I say this because it turns out that all the females that can marry me and join my harem have a male counterpart that you can choose to interact with instead. It apparently doesn’t change your intimacy with the female side, because they are essentially the same person, just a different sex and name that fits that different sex. You can purchase some sort of potion to switch between the male and female version of your significant other (WHAT DO I EVEN CALL THEM NOW? WIFE? HUSBAND? Maybe this is why they call them consorts...) And stats don’t change, just their sex. So, decide you want some cute ladies in your harem as a Sultanah? Get a potion! Make them women! I never did learn if consorts of the same sex can produce children, since it’s random each time and my wives were popping them out faster than I could raise them. But I did induct a man into my harem, I just never got past that part. Kids take a long time to raise…

Back to the love interests, right? Right! So, you literally go strolling through town, and bump into these random people (no choice at all in any of this) and apparently you randomly seduce them and marry them. Yeah, none of this is planned, you just walk around and suddenly you’re getting married. Okay… sure. The good news is there doesn’t seem to be a limit to your harem size, just babies you can raise. And you can’t kill off children-- Not that I’m saying you should! But it really would have saved me some duds if I could. And you can choose to go visit a certain consort, but it costs premium currency, so you can only use the random consort when it’s free, meaning you’re not really choosing anything dealing with romance or baby making. It is all random. All of it. From who you meet, to when you marry, to who you visit, to what kids you get, there is nothing at all that you choose or get a say so in. Worst life simulator ever. And your consorts are basically baby makers - which could play into some domination fantasies if you play a Sultanah and just have all these men hanging on your every word, ready to do the doing when you demand it. But I’m sure you just pop a baby out after the three second nookie that you get, and that’s that. I should have picked a woman when I started. Being a guy was so boring. It was all just boning and war, and no time for pretending that the patriarchy wasn’t running the world. Ugh. Too real. Do not recommend.

Boy Crazy Rating: 10%. Yeah, no, that’s right. There’s no story behind the characters. There’s no real interactions with them. They’re pretty, sure. But that’s literally all you get. Something nice to look at for 2 seconds before you make the whoopie. This is the lowest score I’ve ever given LIs, which means that they’re completely forgettable, and that’s true, because I can’t remember a single one.

Romance: If you consider gift giving to raise stats romantic, then you’ve got about 5% of this game! That’s-- Uh, that’s not a lot… So, I mentioned in the previous section that you literally stroll through your kingdom and bump into strangers and then marry them, right? Well, there’s a little more to it than that. You bump into them multiple times. Every time you randomly get a person from that “area” of town (that area that you also don’t pick, remember?) there is one, yes one line from either your character, or their character that’s something rather generic like, “The sky is gorgeous today,” “I think ships are interesting,” “I’m a Hufflepuff!” and other boring and completely unrelated things to the characters, then they either decide to marry you, or don’t, and you also don’t get to make a choice on that, it’s all the game. I don’t even want to think about how terrible of a run-on sentence that one was.

But what about gift giving?! Yes, there is that. You can give your consorts gifts to boost their stats to hopefully have better statted children. But they don’t care what you give them. There are no bad gifts. They all give a static bonus. You can give everyone the same gift and no one will have any opinion on it one way or the other. The point is: there is no romance. It’s just a gacha breeding game at that point.

Heart Palpitation Rating: F. F is not for friendship or f*cking, it’s for a failure of a game when it comes to building romance or relationships. Duty, family, honor. I guess they’re all Tullys at heart. (If you don’t get this Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire reference, then that’s totally okay, it’s not for everyone.)

Spice: Fail. Oh, sorry. There’s just so much red in this review, I got lost on where to put another failure of a rating. There is baby making in this game! But… it is as far removed as one can be so they can… I don’t know, maybe… I don’t know! What is the point of this game? There’s no plot. There’s no romance. There’s no spice. I rode a goddamned horse and rubbed a lamp and those are not innuendo for what this section is about, I literally rode a horse and rubbed a lamp and that gave me more action that I could get from my own consorts. What is the f*cking point? Certainly not fornicating! When you visit your consort and get to the sexy times, she (or he) disappears behind a curtain and it waves a bit and then it’s over. About three seconds of play time before a baby is possibly born. Worst. Sex. Ever.

Cold Shower Rating: Fail. There are no “thrilling love stories with your consorts”, there is no "delving in passionate affairs", the most action you get borders on the mundane. It's just a breeze flowing by a curtain and 10 levels of child-rearing to slog through. Just like real life!

Angst: A is for Ahahaha, not for angst. Okay, so there is fighting in this game… sort of. I mean, you amass troops and then go on a campaign to spread the Ottoman Empire by fighting the Romans, and other people around your borders which are ill-defined, so you just basically go to a new map and click outposts and fight. This is the only place that there seems to be a story, but even so it seems to just stretch to: fight this fight, we cornered the bad guy! He got away somehow. Fight the next fight! He insults your people, but only mildly so because you’re kicking his ass. You’ve cornered him in a keep! He… got away… You see the pattern here? There was one line I liked out of all of this, but I think I’d done a few hundred battles by that time, and one line at that point is very disheartening.

But really, there’s little to no actual angst in this game. Sometimes your council tells you there was a drought, or there was fighting, and you say, “Don’t collect the grain this time.” or “Enlist more men to fill those we lost.” But you’re so far removed from any actual problems or plot that it matters to your character as much as it matters to the game, which is like 1%. Pretty close to zero, actually. And then you can fight in the campaign, but it’s very Age of Empires II graphics, and you can skip the displayed fighting and just quick complete battles for free, so you don’t even have to do anything but click a button and replenish men. Yeah… This game is just about management. Maybe there are some horrors with that, but not with the hand I was dealt. I’m pretty good with numbers, so adding and subtracting wasn’t difficult or angsty.

Drama Llama Rating: 2/10 The drama llama is missing, they’re not even here to observe. I’ve been more concerned in E-rated dress up games than I was in this one.

Voice Acting: I guess you could say partial, as there are sound bites, but I’d just rather go with none since they don’t advertise it and it is basically “zug zug” and “Job done!”

Expression Rating: N/A

Art: Well here we go, the best part of the game! It’s pretty. Of course, that’s only when you’re looking at the pretty people, which is probably a few seconds every few hours if you’re keeping up with your timers. So for five minutes a day you can possibly see some good art! Really though, the graphics are pretty good for body shots and sprites, but the rest of the game is rather standard (I think) for a strategy game. You don’t get to see any actual combat. The backgrounds are detailed, but there are no new ones. They’re just the same city, the same castle, and the same menu over and over again. Sprites have no clothing changes (that I was made aware of, however, I know you can purchase clothes with real money and I wasn’t about to do that). And sprites don’t have expression or pose changes, they’re completely static. Pretty in theory, good overall, but rather lackluster in execution.

Still Picture Rating: ★★☆☆☆ Many pretty. Such rendered sprites. Very absent from the main game.

CGs: There… are none? All the artwork in the game is used in the game, with sprites taking the place of every character as is expected during normal gameplay. All the artwork outside of the game stays outside of the game. So nifty things like these advertisements…

Are complete rubbish. You never get to interact with the characters or pets in that fashion. So, there really aren’t any CGs in any form I know how to rate. There is no gallery. There is no dress up game. There’s a whole lot of nothing when it comes to extra photos.

Look at this Photograph Rating: 0% There are no photos. I suppose you could snap your own of the normal art, it is nice looking, but there are no CGs to this game.

UI/Mechanics: Have you ever wondered what having a game all about menus would be like? Ehn… Game of Sultans is better than that, but it is menus on menus on menus. Even your home screen has roughly six buttons dedicated to menus, with another dozen lining the sides of the screen for various events or quick menus, and the background for your home screen? Yep, you guessed it! It is a map layout of your kingdom (I guess?) and it’s full of menus! Click the stables to go there and open more menus! Click the port to open exploration mission menus! Click on the feast hall to open player interaction menus! You’ll never get tired of the amount of clicking you can do in this game! And let’s hope you remember where everything is, because otherwise you’ll just end up digging around forever. There really are that many different menus.

So, the layout sucks. I’d say the currency system sucks as well, but if you’re into strategy and management games, it’s not bad. It’s a little convoluted since you can open an item about three times before getting the actual “use” item that applies a stat, but if you’re about the management side of things, I guess that can be fun? There certainly are easier ways to do it. But I think that’s the point, to make it feel more strategic by planning out levels and battles rather than guess-click your way through. TBH, you can just guess-click your way through the first 15-20 levels, so don’t worry; by that time you should know what’s what.

The game advertising sucks. This game is not at all what it claims to be. The ads that target romance players indicate that you have choices in the romance building, and you have exactly zero. The child-rearing consists of you clicking a button that apparently feeds a baby sprite every few hours, and it just grows up to be a young man/woman who you then marry off and… that’s it. I guess you get some choices in who they’ll marry, which is more than you get for who you marry. The pets that get to be played with actually get to be played with! But you poke them and they get hearts because I guess you pet them and then they run around in their pen. Yeah, you don’t actually get to play with them. There is no fighting fights, you do math and send your peeps on a mission, that’s it. There is no feasting and dancing, you pay to have a seat and then your icon sits at a table… that’s it. Really, there’s nothing to do in this game except resource management, with no interaction outside of building numbers.

What’s this button do? Rating: F. I’d like to see a comprehensive menu map for this game, because I think it would be hilarious to try to use it intelligently. Too many menus. Non-romance gameplay. At least I’m not waiting for the construction of buildings, but I’m waiting for literally everything else.

Errors: I said the art was the best part of the game, but I think it might actually be the lack of errors. That or I didn’t care enough to make note of any errors once I realized there was no story. I guess this gets a passing rating because the game never forced closed on me, it never lagged on me, and I had no graphic issues or game-breaking issues. There is not enough dialogue to determine if conversation would be awkward, and honestly I don’t even know if this is an original English game, but I don’t care enough to do the research. Suffice to say, it should be fine.

Here there be Bugs Rating: Pass. Nothing to make note of, but I also wasn’t looking because I stopped caring before I was done with the tutorial. Despite playing for much longer than that, I think I just blacked it out while I mathed.

Background Music: I’m sure there was music that I had on mute. I’m also sure I listened to it at some point, but I think riding the horse or fighting the battles annoyed me because of all the yelling that was quite awkward out of context. I vaguely remember something soft and melodic, but maybe I’m making that up. Doesn’t matter, this part doesn’t get rated anyways.

BY OUR RATINGS COMBINED!: Oh ho! You thought you were done, didn’t you? Don’t worry, this will be short. Sometimes my individual ratings do not always add up to my overall rating; this is because I find a reason to rate the game based on things that are not listed in my (very) long review. I couldn’t section everything. Sometimes price factors in. Sometimes personal tastes. Basically, what it comes down to is would I buy this game knowing everything I know? Would I recommend it to a friend? Nope. If someone came at me with this information, I wouldn’t even give it a go as a romance-related game. Now, I do have fun mathing and managing, and the game is fine for that, but I wasn’t having fun with it. How many babies can I get? What happens when they get married? Can same sex couples have kids? These are some things I’d try out to get the answers for, but quit once I ran out of new theories to test, and that wouldn’t take long. I also wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, it is swamped with micro-transaction and pay to win mechanics and I know too many people that don’t have the financial fortitude to keep from dropping hundreds of dollars on this game without feeling guilty right after. If that’s your thing, take a look, just don’t feel guilty? I’d hate for people to feel worse about something that’s supposed to be entertainment rather than better as is supposed to be the case.