Welcome Time Wasters!
It’s been awhile since I last delved into browser based gaming and I couldn’t help but see what I’ve missed out on in the past few weeks. It was during these adventures across the internet that I stumbled across Mad Princess. The name intrigued me enough, so I thought I’d give it a try.
Mad Princess is a game all about a princess who wants to be saved by a hero in shining armor, or at least that is what she would have the heroes think. The Mad Princess is exactly that, mad. She sets up traps throughout her castle to kill off any would be heroes and takes great pleasure in it to boot. Of course our Mad Princess doesn’t have an unlimited supply of traps laying around her castle, so instead she uses the blood of the fallen heroes and dark magic to summon all of her wonderful toys.
Mad Princess is shown from a 2-D side-scroller perspective. The Mad Princess stays at the right side of the screen and heroes enter from the left. Each level allows the player to use certain traps and starts the player off with a certain amount of hero blood to summon traps with. The traps are straightforward enough so as not to overcomplicate the game, but using more than one trap at a time will yield better results to the more strategy oriented players.
Of course there is more than one kind of hero out there and each one brings their own special flavor to the game. Knights are the basic hero who have all mid range stats and no special abilities. Thieves are weaker than knights but move more quickly, cannot be hurt by spike floors and will slip past crossbows rather than destroy them before moving on (these buggers are easily the most annoying hero in the game). The last type of hero is a Brute; they have excellent defense, lots of health and strong attacks but are very slow and don’t handle sloped floors well. Defeating all of these heroes and stopping them from ‘saving’ our Mad Princess can be a tough task that will require players to try multiple different strategies while playing the game.
Mad Princess has a nice presentation to it with simple graphics from the far flung past of retro gaming. I should take this moment to mention that I love the fact retro gaming has made a return and that many browser based games feel like they could’ve been around during the hay day of the Super Nintendo.
Audio in Mad Princess isn’t really anything to write home about. Sure sound effects are alright but I just couldn’t get behind the music. When a level is competed a very dull sounding victory theme is played that made it feel like my win wasn’t really all that great.
In the end Mad Princess is an intriguing idea that when put into game form pans out really well. The strategy involved is rewarding for those who enjoy the genre but not so overly complex that it will turn away other gamers. To go with this are some nice retro looking graphics (which always go over well with me). Unfortunately, the sound track is a little lacking with the main victory theme giving off a feel of ‘meh’ rather than making me excited for my triumphs. Overall though, Mad Princess is a good game that you should really take some time out of your day to play.
Mad Princess murders its way to 3 GiN Gems out of 5!