On the subject of monsters: these guys all look the same, and will randomly wander into town to attack a building unless destroyed by arrows fired by a barracks, or taken out by your town's hero unit. The hero just kind of hangs out in the town until needed for one of two tasks. If you click on a monster as it walks into town, your hero will essay out to attack it hand-to-hand. Once battle is joined, it's just a straight-out slugfest, with the two warriors trading blows until one has died. It's not immediately obvious who will emerge victorious -- there's only a rudimentary health bar below either of the combatants to let you know who's dying faster, and no way to directly affect the outcome of the battle. If the hero wins, he'll walk back to the building he came from to heal his wounds until he's needed again. If another monster wanders into town while he's returning to a building, he won't be available to attack until he's entered the building.

There does seem to be a slight benefit to letting your hero rest for longer lengths of time before making him fight again, but it's definitely hard to say for sure. Sometimes he wins a battle, and sometimes he doesn't. The other thing the hero does is goes out on quests. These quests take the form of small scrolls that pop up at random times on the left of the screen. Clicking on one will give you the parameters for completion of the quest, and what you'll get in return. Only heroes can take quests, and they won't always be successful. Rewards range from gold, to materials, to increased building speed, and others. Quests do go away if you ignore them, so take the time to check them out to make sure you want to do them before dismissing them. The hero must be in a building to be available to out on a quest, and there is a nominal gold fee to accept, ranging from 1 gold to 1,000.

The fourth type of building (in the demo, at least) is the service building, which is an Inn. Other than providing a bit more income, I wasn't able to discern the purpose of the Inn outside of being one of the requirements to fulfill finishing a level.

A couple of things that could be improved in Be A King: It might be nice to have a speed selector, as there were many times when I had to just wait for the proper amount of gold to be accrued without much else happening. Also, and this may be a demo issue, when in the Materials tab, there are icons for each resource with the gold purchase amount displayed on them. These amounts sometimes prove to be incorrect -- if the smallest amount of wood has a 500 gold cost displayed, I don't want to click on the icon and discover that the cost is actually twice that.

Still, I'm enough of a fan of this type of game to think about picking it up. You can grab the demo right here on Big Download for Mac and PC.