On the surface Kingdom is a fun, enjoyable game but, a few key flaws in game design stop it from reaching its full potential.
Kingdom is a 2-D strategy game that puts you in the roll of the king (or queen) of a strange land of monsters and forest people.
You start the game on a horse riding though a forest. You quickly approach a campfire with some coins and 2 rather lost looking peasants but, money is power and after you drop a few coins they become more than happy to serve your highness.
That’s how this entire game works actually, paying people. You start out with 1 builder and 1 archer (and you unlock farmers and knights after a few upgrades with the ability to hire more right away….. sort of. You have 4 stations at the center of your kingdom that let you create more workers. How do you get workers? Simple! Ride out into the forest and pay the random people who live there. Once payed they will walk back to your camp and collect either a hammer, bow, or hoe depending on what’s available; and there lies my first problem with this game: they walk.
The movement speed in this game is awful for both your horse (which you never get off) and your kingdom’s people. Your horse has 2 speeds: walk and run. The only problem is the walk speed in this game is way too slow to be of any use so you always have to be running but, your horse can only run for so long before your horse gets tired and can only walk for a short time. You can speed up this cooldown by stopping completely and let your horse much on some grass but this burns up valuable day light.
The people themselves will only walk everywhere which may seem fine at first but when it takes a new archer literally all day to get to a watch tower on the outskirts of the kingdom you run into a big problem. The monsters
Kingdom has a day/night cycle. During the day your farmers will head into the fields to farm and any free archers will hunt any animals they find around. All of this earns you coins and you can use to upgrade and expand your kingdom but in order to get these coins your have to ride by each unit one after another which gets very tedious.
Once the sun goes down however it’s a different story. On each side of your kingdom there are 2 portals that will spit out monsters that will assault your kingdom all in order to get one thing; your crown. You have the ability to build watch towers, walls and catapults in order to defend your kingdom and any coins you may be carrying will soak up a few hits but if your crown gets knocked off and grabbed by a monster it’s game over. No crown, no kingdom.
Remember earlier how I said everything walks slow in the game? There’s on exception to that: the monsters. The move super quick and unless you have walls up there won’t be any protection for you and your units. Once a monster hits a unit he will drop his tool and rush back to pick it up but, of he gets hit on his way back he’ll be knocked back to present status meaning you’ll have to pay him again to get him back in your ranks. The monsters are greedy too. If a worker drops his tool a monster can grab it and take off meaning, you’ll have to rebuy the tool as well. Worse of all, if a blood moon rises the number of monsters for that night with be much larger then the normal amount.
The second problem I have with this game is the way is handles units. Once a person takes a job it is impossible for them to change it. I once got to a point where I had completely cleared one side of portals. What happens to all the archers in towers, farmers and knights on that side once all the monster portals are gone? Everyone just sits there, doing nothing. So I had gotten myself to a point where I never had enough men to attack the right side to they would get hit by monsters and lose their weapons and hammers then they would have to walk all the way back the center of the map, pick up a new tool then walk all the way back out but by that time it was night again and the cycle just repeated.
If only the AI were better and things moved faster there would be a fantastic game here.