9 Kings short review: A restrictive early access mess that barely justifies half price

So 9 Kings was over half off at £8 alongside the big new Multiplayer Update. I grabbed it thinking my friend and I could dive into a fun co-op run, before quickly realising it is strictly PvP multiplayer. Let us get this straight right out of the gate. This is very much just another typical roguelite, tower defence, and deckbuilder mix. Did I mention it is also Early Access? It has the whole standard indie shebang attached to it.

The presentation is entirely forgettable:

The pixel graphics are whatever. They are incredibly low quality, offering nothing pleasant to look at and absolutely nothing notable. You would assume stripping the visuals back to basic retro pixels means the developers at Sad Socket nailed the functionality and readability, but they clearly did not invest in the style or the presentation at all.

Fun at first, but heavily restrictive:

The core loop hooks you initially with a neat mix of auto-battler tower defence and grid-based synergy building on your starting 3x3 tiles. I quickly hit the peaks, though. Yes, you can eventually draft some broken combinations and fill the screen with absolute silliness, but the actual minute-to-minute gameplay is restrictive and honestly kinda mid. The meaningful choices simply are not there.

The strategic depth is seriously lacking:

Boring buffs: Most upgrades are just lazy percentage increases rather than game-changing abilities.

Samey units: The vast majority of drafted cards and spawned units really do not feel any different from each other once they hit the battlefield.

Irrelevant rulers: The different factions like the King of Blood or the King of Nomads technically offer unique flavours and starting decks. You can honestly just ignore those specific mechanics entirely because they rarely matter to your actual success.

Pacing, RNG, and a lack of content:

The genuinely fun meta-progression perks require you to grind repeatedly. Inside an actual match, you are looking at ten full minutes of tedious setup before you can actually start having fun with your build. Getting to that point is completely dictated by RNG card drafts, of course.

There is a glaring lack of content here too. They recently added the Quest Mode to shake things up, but it is literally just a puzzle-like scenario version where you cannot even customise what you are playing.

Bloody awful UI and tooltips:

Then there is the absolute state of the interface. The tooltips and information presentation are bloody awful. How do you have a garbage pixel art presentation and yet you still cannot even get the UI and tooltips to function decently? Important statistics are completely vague, you have no way to easily track unit buffs or combat stats, and you can barely tell what your cards are actually doing during the chaotic auto-battler phase.