King-Dom

The first hours of Kingdom are a gorgeous and addictive test of city management. With elegant simplicity and an eye for charming detail, it got its hooks into me early on, and I embraced the challenge of unraveling the mystery of how its systems worked. However, just a few hours later I had grown tired of long, dull gallops across a vast kingdom, and developed an ironclad strategy that rendered the opposition all but moot. Kingdom is a flash in the pan, but that flash is bright and beautiful while it lasts.

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When all the arcane is teased out and the seams obvious, not even the beautiful score and gorgeous pixel reflection in the river can encourage me to execute the precise, efficient moves that would lead me to victory.  But while I wasn’t so interested in mechanically performing the “correct” blueprint of success after I figured it out, the journey towards acquiring that knowledge was still worthwhile.

A deceptively simple idea that can become laboured and bewildering as well as oddly compelling, Kingdom: New Lands is certainly a curious take on the strategy genre. Its ambiguous, incredibly minimalistic nature will initially intrigue and could easily frustrate in equal measure. Fans of roguelikes or tower defence-style games may prefer more complexity, as the simple mechanics give you control over choices rather than actions and rely on astute observation and perseverance, rather than on skill or improvisation. There is a balance to learn and a set of rules to be discovered, but even with th...

I understand this is a management game, but you are also a character in this world. Something is lost when all the action takes place and you are just standing there with nothing to do, watching the archers painstakingly attempt to murder monsters. At the time when tension should be at its highest, I found myself sitting back and watching, simply hoping that what I had done was enough; and that AI wasn’t doing something dumb off-screen.