I'm always excited for a new Kingdom game, but at this point, I think I'm more in love with the idea of Kingdom than any of the execution. I can't belive this series has been going for almost a decade and I also can't believe that the original 2-man crew has ballooned into about 15 people and Kingdom: Eighties is all we got out of that company expansion. This is all you have to show for a decade of only working on one series?
That said, I do want to start by saying that I do love the idea of Kingdom. It's so pretty and serene, and I love the combination of relaxing and challenging gameplay that is very simplistic at its core but still involves a lot of quick thinking and planning. All you do is ride left or right while choosing what your workers should do next, and that simplicity can get dull in the long run, but is always refreshing whenever a new game comes out. It's just so cozy and nice to load into a new Kingdom game, dropping some coins to recruit your first few followers, give them some tasks and then head into the great unknown (meaning randomly picking left or right) to explore, find the correct route and hopefully to find some starting budget in the form of a treasure chest, and then heading back to begin your slow expansion of the area by juggling tasks between the left and right sides. From there, expanding your kingdom's borders, recruiting as many workers as you can and hopefully finding cool new vehicles or other minor level mechanics like how you can find and adopt an abandoned dog in Eighties. I love the first few levels of a Kingdom game!
However, at this point, we as players and customers really have to start putting our foot down and asking what it even is this developmeant team does. I believe there was an original-ORIGINAL version before what is now being sold as Kingdom Classic, and including Classic, New Lands, Two Crowns and Eighties, that puts us Kingdom 5 with the standalone release of Eighties. If we count Shogun, Dead Lands and Norse Lands as separate sequels, that puts us at Kingdom 8, and I don't see why we shouldn't count the expansions as sequels since new area, new graphics and a few minor new mechanics is what a "real" Kingdom sequel is. The only real differences between Classic, New Lands, Two Crowns and Eighties is the things I listed (and the fact that Two Crowns is the only one to feature co-op).
So, we're at Kingdom 8 and they've FINALLY managed to nail worker behavior. Even though I've played these games since I got the very first original version in some bundle a decade ago, it's been a rough ride, because I find Classic and New Lands to be borderlines unplayable today, due to how dumb your workers are in those games. It took them three games to finally figure out that maybe archers should be heading back to safety at an earlier time in the day so they don't get killed completely out of your control. I don't know how they've coded it, but that can't have been deeper code than "if time is X, start heading home" and all they needed to do was change the value of X. That took at least three games for them to figure out. We're now at Kingdom 8 and finally, FINALLY, builders can act intelligently and won't run out to their guaranteed death if they have tasks queued up at night. How long until they figure out that it's kind of dumb for archers to become permanent members of a knight's squad, which means they won't hunt and make you more money if you recruit nights? Will it take until Kingdom 26 for these devs to figure out that it might be nice to be able to cancel tasks?
The incredibly slow evolution of this series aside, Eighties is actually a step backwards as well. No co-op this time, even though I don't think anyone understands why they didn't just build this on the Two Crowns codebase so they could keep the work they'd already done. The hermits are also all gone from this one. The little guys you could recruit in previous games that would tag along to the next island if you recruited them, and they had unique buildings like the bakery and such. All of that stuff is gone, and Eighties only has archers, builders, barriers and a couple of new features. It's like scaling all the way back down to Classic, while also adding overpowered laser towers and changing the siege ballista to a dumpster the player can control. I do like this latter change and how it raises player agency and involvement, because with the new dumpster, you can be much more dynamically strategic with when and how you destroy monster portals. In previous games, you had to recruit knights and then time the attack so that they could make it back, which was a different kind of strategy, but I think I very much prefer being able to choose when to attack and not being held back by needing to slowly expand in order to create a short enough route for your knights. This, however, also makes the game quite a lot easier and the level is always over once you achieve access to the dumpster. From then, it's not a matter of if you're going to win, but when, at least on every difficulty except the highest one. Oh, and Eighties completely gets rid of the fast-travel portals from previous games, for reasons unknown to everyone except the slowest dev team of all time, which makes the latter parts of stages become a real drag as you slowly (SO slowly) trek from side to side.
We've also got to talk about how this dev team is so extremely slow that they made an 80s homage and released it in 2023. Come on, synthwave and "the 80s that never was" hype was in 2013. I went to a couple of synthwave shows in 2019, Carpenter Brut and Perturbator, and that was years after I had stopped actively listening and had gotten bored of retro 80s, and I only went as a throwback to the years prior where I had still cared. These devs are so late with this game and their references are so tired. The really weird thing is that I didn't really spot any homages to The Goonies or Explorers, or any other kids on bikes movie? The references are the usual and very overused Robocop, Back to the Future, Transformers and, well, there is a hidden and annoyingly hard to find bike that's an ET reference so I guess that counts. This isn't really 80s: The Game, it's actually Stranger Things: The Game, and it seems like the team don't actually know the references Stranger Things is making. I guess maybe this dev team is all around or under 30 and never actually lived the 80s.
All in all, I do still love the coziness, simplicity and chill atmosphere combined with light strategy in these games, and I had a good enough time with Eighties over a weekend of beating every difficulty and unlocking every trophy, but they have got to step it up and it's remarkable that 15 people took this long to make a "sequel" that actually mostly just regresses from previous entries by leaving out too many established features and introducing too few new ones. I enjoyed myself, it was a good 15 hours or so of gameplay, even if levels always dragged too much at the end due to the lack of fast travel, and I will buy the next Kingdom game as soon as I can because I always like the first half of it and only get frustrated by the odd design and coding choices in the latter half, but really, I still have to complain about how this series has only taken baby steps forward in ten years and that it seems like we will never get the actually fully realized version of this game. It'll just always feel like a beta of a fantastic idea in the hands of just downright impressively incompetent developers that don't seem to be doing this full time. If this is just a side project, then that's fine and I respect it, but Eighties makes it seem like the team is an actual company with a name and staff that do other things than game dev now, and if that's the case, they have got to step it up and release the true version of Kingdom already. They could make Kingdom 10 the version where all workers finally behave intelligently in all situations, where traversing the latter half of levels doesn't take too long even with fast travel, where you can cancel tasks and where the game can be something grander and deeper that I can't put my finger on since I'm not a game designer. The basic design deserves so much better than the extremely slow and often sloppy development this series has seen.
That said, I do want to start by saying that I do love the idea of Kingdom. It's so pretty and serene, and I love the combination of relaxing and challenging gameplay that is very simplistic at its core but still involves a lot of quick thinking and planning. All you do is ride left or right while choosing what your workers should do next, and that simplicity can get dull in the long run, but is always refreshing whenever a new game comes out. It's just so cozy and nice to load into a new Kingdom game, dropping some coins to recruit your first few followers, give them some tasks and then head into the great unknown (meaning randomly picking left or right) to explore, find the correct route and hopefully to find some starting budget in the form of a treasure chest, and then heading back to begin your slow expansion of the area by juggling tasks between the left and right sides. From there, expanding your kingdom's borders, recruiting as many workers as you can and hopefully finding cool new vehicles or other minor level mechanics like how you can find and adopt an abandoned dog in Eighties. I love the first few levels of a Kingdom game!
However, at this point, we as players and customers really have to start putting our foot down and asking what it even is this developmeant team does. I believe there was an original-ORIGINAL version before what is now being sold as Kingdom Classic, and including Classic, New Lands, Two Crowns and Eighties, that puts us Kingdom 5 with the standalone release of Eighties. If we count Shogun, Dead Lands and Norse Lands as separate sequels, that puts us at Kingdom 8, and I don't see why we shouldn't count the expansions as sequels since new area, new graphics and a few minor new mechanics is what a "real" Kingdom sequel is. The only real differences between Classic, New Lands, Two Crowns and Eighties is the things I listed (and the fact that Two Crowns is the only one to feature co-op).
So, we're at Kingdom 8 and they've FINALLY managed to nail worker behavior. Even though I've played these games since I got the very first original version in some bundle a decade ago, it's been a rough ride, because I find Classic and New Lands to be borderlines unplayable today, due to how dumb your workers are in those games. It took them three games to finally figure out that maybe archers should be heading back to safety at an earlier time in the day so they don't get killed completely out of your control. I don't know how they've coded it, but that can't have been deeper code than "if time is X, start heading home" and all they needed to do was change the value of X. That took at least three games for them to figure out. We're now at Kingdom 8 and finally, FINALLY, builders can act intelligently and won't run out to their guaranteed death if they have tasks queued up at night. How long until they figure out that it's kind of dumb for archers to become permanent members of a knight's squad, which means they won't hunt and make you more money if you recruit nights? Will it take until Kingdom 26 for these devs to figure out that it might be nice to be able to cancel tasks?
The incredibly slow evolution of this series aside, Eighties is actually a step backwards as well. No co-op this time, even though I don't think anyone understands why they didn't just build this on the Two Crowns codebase so they could keep the work they'd already done. The hermits are also all gone from this one. The little guys you could recruit in previous games that would tag along to the next island if you recruited them, and they had unique buildings like the bakery and such. All of that stuff is gone, and Eighties only has archers, builders, barriers and a couple of new features. It's like scaling all the way back down to Classic, while also adding overpowered laser towers and changing the siege ballista to a dumpster the player can control. I do like this latter change and how it raises player agency and involvement, because with the new dumpster, you can be much more dynamically strategic with when and how you destroy monster portals. In previous games, you had to recruit knights and then time the attack so that they could make it back, which was a different kind of strategy, but I think I very much prefer being able to choose when to attack and not being held back by needing to slowly expand in order to create a short enough route for your knights. This, however, also makes the game quite a lot easier and the level is always over once you achieve access to the dumpster. From then, it's not a matter of if you're going to win, but when, at least on every difficulty except the highest one. Oh, and Eighties completely gets rid of the fast-travel portals from previous games, for reasons unknown to everyone except the slowest dev team of all time, which makes the latter parts of stages become a real drag as you slowly (SO slowly) trek from side to side.
We've also got to talk about how this dev team is so extremely slow that they made an 80s homage and released it in 2023. Come on, synthwave and "the 80s that never was" hype was in 2013. I went to a couple of synthwave shows in 2019, Carpenter Brut and Perturbator, and that was years after I had stopped actively listening and had gotten bored of retro 80s, and I only went as a throwback to the years prior where I had still cared. These devs are so late with this game and their references are so tired. The really weird thing is that I didn't really spot any homages to The Goonies or Explorers, or any other kids on bikes movie? The references are the usual and very overused Robocop, Back to the Future, Transformers and, well, there is a hidden and annoyingly hard to find bike that's an ET reference so I guess that counts. This isn't really 80s: The Game, it's actually Stranger Things: The Game, and it seems like the team don't actually know the references Stranger Things is making. I guess maybe this dev team is all around or under 30 and never actually lived the 80s.
All in all, I do still love the coziness, simplicity and chill atmosphere combined with light strategy in these games, and I had a good enough time with Eighties over a weekend of beating every difficulty and unlocking every trophy, but they have got to step it up and it's remarkable that 15 people took this long to make a "sequel" that actually mostly just regresses from previous entries by leaving out too many established features and introducing too few new ones. I enjoyed myself, it was a good 15 hours or so of gameplay, even if levels always dragged too much at the end due to the lack of fast travel, and I will buy the next Kingdom game as soon as I can because I always like the first half of it and only get frustrated by the odd design and coding choices in the latter half, but really, I still have to complain about how this series has only taken baby steps forward in ten years and that it seems like we will never get the actually fully realized version of this game. It'll just always feel like a beta of a fantastic idea in the hands of just downright impressively incompetent developers that don't seem to be doing this full time. If this is just a side project, then that's fine and I respect it, but Eighties makes it seem like the team is an actual company with a name and staff that do other things than game dev now, and if that's the case, they have got to step it up and release the true version of Kingdom already. They could make Kingdom 10 the version where all workers finally behave intelligently in all situations, where traversing the latter half of levels doesn't take too long even with fast travel, where you can cancel tasks and where the game can be something grander and deeper that I can't put my finger on since I'm not a game designer. The basic design deserves so much better than the extremely slow and often sloppy development this series has seen.