Gadgetory

hey Ron i'm steve from gamers nexus net and today we're talking about Kingdom Kingdom is a 2013 flash game originally developed by Noah but expanded upon and brought to PC in cooperation with fellow developer licorice and the game is being published by Rob URI this is the company's first published title Kingdom is a two-dimensional side-scrolling kingdom building and expansion game with inspiration taken from capitalism of course and in the game we take charge as a king or queen of a soon to be built kingdom within the two-dimensional randomly generated landscape which does have bounding boxes effectively on the sides there is a limit to how large landscape is and in the game our set of actions is fairly minimal it is definitely a minimalist inspired game your actions include movement left to right sprinting on your horse and throw-in money around and that's the key thing really the whole game revolves around this concept of using money to compel peasants archers what have you to complete the various somewhat limited tasks in the game but that minimalist approach doesn't doesn't mean a bad thing it does not take away from the design in fact it adds to it and that's sort of where Kingdom gets its charm Kingdom sort of reminds us of Majesty in one key aspect and it's important to note that Majesty and Kingdom are nothing at all alike but the game Majesty uses in direct input to control NPCs within the game so this is not a game where you can micromanage your followers your peasants your Knights you use indirect input through the form of coins to compel your soon-to-be followers to do different tasks so you can turn them into builders by giving them hammers which you buy at a shop with your coin that hammer is dropped on the ground someone picks it up they then go on to build towers walls castles and other things like that economy generating buildings like farms all of these things cost coin and in the case of the economy building generate coin so it is very important to build a strong economy early on and then use that money generated to expand your kingdom in the form of walls knights and archers to help defend the kingdom against assault assault happens every night by sort of lovecraftian style Horrors they're not really zombies but they're they're weird things they live in the woods they have masks and they chase you very quickly and if they catch you if you're not within the walls of your kingdom safely if you don't have your archers and knights defending you then these creatures will seize your crown at which point you've either got to retrieve it very quickly or you lose and this is a permadeath game so should you lose your crown and fail to retrieve it immediately then that's it game over you've got to start a new Kingdom as a new king or queen from scratch from a new randomly generated map Kingdom is exceedingly easy to pick up and play because of its minimalistic place I'll but there is actually a decent level of depth to it and that feeds from its addictive charm as what was once a flash game there's very little in the way of tutorial other than the first couple seconds of the game and this is all overall a good thing but at times the minimalism can get a bit frustrating especially when it comes to the lack of micromanagement which is a core design choice and does work out to be pretty good in the long run but as a new player it is a frustrating design choice because sometimes it's you're watching your archers walk around on the wrong side of the village contributing nothing to their dying hordes of friends who are being mowed down by hell spawn on the opposite side of the village and there's also no way to cancel orders so should you decide that building an extra wall where you chose to build one is no longer a good choice because night is falling there's no way to stop that from happening this does feed into the game strategy a little bit and that's why we think that the game is making good on its choice of minimalism but you have to get past that initial barrier of frustration to fully enjoy it the game is ten it's a true indie title at true indie price and everything you see in the trailer everything you see in this gameplay footage over the voice-over is basically all you get there's not much more to it you wander side to side you build stuff you try to survive as long as possible and eventually you probably die and then start over now there is technically a wind condition in the game Patrick who wrote the review put in about 30 hours of gameplay and never got to that wind condition so either he's terrible at it what she actually seems to be pretty good or it's actually kind of hard to get to so there's a wooden condition you're mostly going to be dying permadeath style and then just repeating until you get a good process going and you can develop a strategy for progressing on the game that is kingdom overall we like the game we found that it was worth the ten dollars in price and you can read the full review links in the description below or Patrick lengthen talks in a great depth about how the game plays through its gameplay mechanics and what type of player should be buying the game there are a few small caveats and they are mostly rooted in the core design of the game which means that either you get used to them and grow to like them or you will never get used to them and you can't stand it and those caveats as discussed are primarily to do with the lack of micromanagement so it's either good or really annoying and that is up to you to decide it is worth looking into for sure though if you want a quick pick up and play game that has some level of depth to it and will give you more than your ten dollars worth in terms of hours that's all for our kingdom review at check the link in the description below for more information and of course as always if you like this content please check our patreon page help us out there we're hugely grateful to those of you who have already and I will see you all next time