Knights of Pen and Paper +1 Edition Review

Knights of Pen and Paper has an interesting premise. Instead of the traditional fantasy RPG story, you are playing as Dungeon Master and friends playing a table top turn based role playing game. This puts a fun spin on turn based RPG's using the premise to break the 4th wall, and streamlines the usual RPG quests. When you start a game you pick who is going to sit at the table and play. This involves a variety of characters like hipsters, little brothers, rocker and grandmothers and each have their own skills. Then you choose what class you want to use them as. The classes are the usual RPG type: Warrior, Paladin, Mages and so on. To make best use of your character skill you'll want to match them to a class that compliments it, such as matching a skill that draws attacks with class that can take damage and recover easily.

Now you have your adventurers, you embark on the quest. There is always a story quest you can do to keep the game moving along, but at any time you can also make your own quest. Here you choose from a list that draws on the standard RPG quests; kill the monsters, find some items (by killing all the monsters) and escorting an NPC (once again by killing monsters). While there is some 'variety' in the quests, they all come down to the same thing; killing monsters. Once again on the mobile this wasn't an issue as mobile gaming sessions are limited by battery and free time gaming on the phone, on the PC this becomes repetitive fast unless you play for short sessions.

Most of the time you can select the difficulty of fights. The more monsters or tougher monsters, the more strategy you'll need. Sometimes you won't get a choice in who you fight, and the game can quickly become punishing, but for most fights you'll get by with good management of skills and healing.

I initially played the iOS version and have gotten plenty of game time out of it. It's disappointing that the game on my phone is the exact same as on the PC, if you're going to make people pay more than there needs to be more content.

The visuals are pixel art which makes the game look like an RPG from the Super Nintendo, even on a PC screen they look nice and colourful. The music is of the chip tune variety which compliments the pixel art well, it fits in with the old 8bit/16bit RPGs of the 90's. The music is fine while playing a short burst on the mobile, on the PC you might want to put on your own music after half an hour.

Another carry over from the mobile version is micro transactions. There is only one form of currency in the game so it depends if you want more gold. In all honesty you should never get to the point you need to fork out extra money, gold is easy enough to earn given most of the game is battles. The game never shoves it in your face, just be aware that it's there if you really need it.

Conclusion

Knights of Pen & Paper +1 is a fine game for the mobile, but it doesn't work as well on the PC. There are plenty of quests to take on and you can always make your own. The fast paced nature of the game isn't necessary on the PC and it shows. I would recommend picking this up for the mobile over the PC version. While it's still fun, it would have benefitted from filling the game with PC-only content to give players a reason to keep coming back. If this was a mobile review the score would be higher, but to put the same game on the PC for a higher price it is just not worth it.