Queen's Loyalty

Queen's Loyalty puts the player in the role of Traborn, a dark knight cursed by the Goddess of Order for failing to slay a group of monster queens who appeared after the Goddess of Chaos vanished. Rather than defeat them, Traborn instead won their loyalty and forged an uneasy peace between two lands, before falling into a long sleep. When he wakes, that peace has collapsed, and the player must reunite the scattered monster queens, level up their stats and skills, and hold accountable whoever broke the truce. Developed and published by eTIRUe, a studio with a long back catalogue of similarly character-driven action games, it released as a full, non-Early-Access title on 9 December 2025, for Windows only, priced at US$13.99.

The studio's most ambitious cast yet

Reviewers who have followed eTIRUe's earlier releases, including titles referenced by name like Crawling Lab, Unclean Water, Abyss School, and Wolf Mate, are quick to frame Queen's Loyalty as a clear step up in scope. One longtime fan calls it "definitely the most ambitious game they have made to date," pointing specifically to a more varied hub world and level design that doesn't reuse "the exact same assets" across every stage, a recurring complaint about some of the studio's earlier work. Another reviewer who has played several of the developer's games says the hub world is "way more interesting" this time and praises a wider variety of enemies instead of palette-swapped repeats. With thirteen playable monster queens, each carrying a distinct moveset, ability set, and personality, the character roster is consistently the single most-praised element of the game across the review pool, whether a reviewer's overall verdict is positive or negative.

Combat that lands somewhere between Genshin and Dynasty Warriors

The moment-to-moment gameplay mixes horde-clearing hack-and-slash combat with a character-switching system reviewers compare to Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves, layered over lighter RPG stat- and skill-point progression. One reviewer who initially left a negative review over an unplayable tutorial bug returned after a patch to call the combat "simple yet entertaining," describing the character-swap mechanic as approachable even for players unfamiliar with the genre. Several reviewers note that despite the straightforward "distribute points into stats" progression, the thirteen characters genuinely play differently enough to matter, with distinct attack ranges, summon abilities, and support skills. That variety comes with a sharp downside, though: multiple reviewers single out one specific character, Necna, as dramatically overpowered relative to the rest of the cast, with one saying bluntly that players "likely won't have to use any other character" once she's unlocked, undercutting some of the roster's intended variety in practice.

A rough launch that's still being patched

The most consistent complaint in the review pool isn't about the cast or combat design, it's about the state the game shipped in. Multiple reviewers report significant bugs at launch, including a tutorial sequence some players couldn't get past at all, missing textures, sudden frame-rate drops, janky hitboxes, and a bug that could leave a character stuck at a doorway. One reviewer's advice was blunt: "don't buy the game and wait for patches." Several of these same reviewers explicitly updated their reviews after eTIRUe pushed fixes, one noting the character-switching bug from the tutorial had already been resolved, and another crediting the developer's track record of continuing to support and expand its games well past launch as a reason for cautious optimism rather than a full refund request. That pattern, a bumpy but actively-patched launch rather than an abandoned one, appears to be a known quantity among the studio's returning fanbase specifically because it has played out with the developer's earlier titles too.

Beyond the bugs, the core gameplay loop draws its own share of criticism. One reviewer describes the main loop as "running around various empty fields chasing down enemies... before teleporting back to the castle to upgrade your queens and accept the next mission," arguing that because missions are paced to match the player's expected experience gain, there's rarely any real sense of growing stronger relative to the challenge in front of them. Another reviewer adds that the resource grind for upgrading skills feels unreasonably tedious relative to what it unlocks, and questions why the game built two hundred levels of character progression when the main story wraps up around level 75 to 83.

Steam's achievement data gives a rough outside view of how far players are getting. Of 31 tracked achievements, the most common sits at 96% (almost certainly an early-story milestone), tapering gradually down to two shared final achievements, "The Overlord" and "Queen's Loyalty," both sitting at 33.6%. That roughly one-in-three completion rate for the game's ending lines up with reviewers' own estimates of a 15-to-20-hour main story, suggesting a meaningful chunk of buyers are seeing the story through despite the grind complaints levelled at the middle stretch.

A castle full of unfinished furniture

Outside of combat, a recurring thread in the review pool is the castle hub itself, a home base the player can upgrade both cosmetically and mechanically as they progress. Reviewers consistently enjoy the idea, one specifically praising the ability to "decorate" the base and "chill with the girls" between missions, and several note that stat-boosting castle upgrades give a second, less grind-heavy avenue for progression alongside levelling individual queens. That said, more than one reviewer points out a gap between the hub's presentation and its interactivity: one calls out a pool and bathtubs visible in the castle that can't actually be used for anything, arguing the space promises more life than the current systems deliver. Side stories and short additional scenes for each of the thirteen queens are generally well received, giving characters who might otherwise be reduced to a moveset and a character portrait some room for actual personality, though at least one longtime fan misses features present in the developer's earlier games, specifically a character gallery and other unlockable extras, that didn't make it into this release.

Final verdict

Queen's Loyalty is eTIRUe's most ambitious release to date, built around a genuinely varied cast of thirteen distinct playable characters and a hub-castle progression system that longtime fans consistently call the studio's best work yet. It's held back, at least at launch, by real technical rough edges, one dramatically overpowered character, and a grind-heavy mission structure that several reviewers found repetitive well before the roughly fifteen-to-twenty-hour story concludes. Recommended for existing fans of the developer's catalogue and players drawn to character-collector action games who don't mind waiting out a bumpy first few patch cycles.