At its core, Kingdom has a fantastic recipe for a game.
It's simple, it's addictive and it's fun, while also having moments of relaxing and laid back strategic gameplay of building your defensive walls and expanding your kingdom to survive from an enslaught of monsters that attack during the night.
The problem is, this game suffers from an exceptional lack of quality of life improvements that add up and you notice as you play and over time, it turns from being seemingly minor nuisances to actual fundamental problems that hamper the player's enjoyment of the game.
A few of these problems include really bad AI or bugs that can be the difference whether you survive to the next day or not. Sometimes the builders won't react to construction set out/walls to build and a lot of these npcs have a TERRIBLE slow walk that slows down their travel around your settlement. At times, they hang around outside of the walls for absolutely no reason and monsters kill them, because they haven't returned to camp fast enough.
And then you lose your hard-earned money and you have to spend even more to get back your workers and archers.
The gain/loss ratio in this game seems so unfair at times.
If monsters break down your walls and kill your archers and builders, and you have very little or none of them left, you might as well stop playing right there and then because you will only lose even more from this and most likely, you just backed yourself into an inevitable game over.
One thing Kingdom would benefit majorly from is assigning specific structures to workers manually, and perhaps a recall button to get npcs inside walls whenever you need them; losing your workers/archers becomes very costly in the long run and there's nothing you can do about it.
Overall I enjoyed Kingdom as a game - the pixelated artstyle is gorgeous, the music is minimalistic and soothing and like I said, the gameplay has so much potential to be both simple and strategic; you only have 3 controls - move left, move right and drop coins to buy something.
But its inherent flaws make it frustrating to play at times and players having to start from scratch every time after a game over, even if it's the fault of the AI, brings the game down.
I first tried it on Epic Games when they gave it away, played it for a good few hours and then found out it's on Steam, I'll keep playing it from time to time but it's worth knowing the shortcomings this game has before picking it up, so you won't be too disappointed.
It's simple, it's addictive and it's fun, while also having moments of relaxing and laid back strategic gameplay of building your defensive walls and expanding your kingdom to survive from an enslaught of monsters that attack during the night.
The problem is, this game suffers from an exceptional lack of quality of life improvements that add up and you notice as you play and over time, it turns from being seemingly minor nuisances to actual fundamental problems that hamper the player's enjoyment of the game.
A few of these problems include really bad AI or bugs that can be the difference whether you survive to the next day or not. Sometimes the builders won't react to construction set out/walls to build and a lot of these npcs have a TERRIBLE slow walk that slows down their travel around your settlement. At times, they hang around outside of the walls for absolutely no reason and monsters kill them, because they haven't returned to camp fast enough.
And then you lose your hard-earned money and you have to spend even more to get back your workers and archers.
The gain/loss ratio in this game seems so unfair at times.
If monsters break down your walls and kill your archers and builders, and you have very little or none of them left, you might as well stop playing right there and then because you will only lose even more from this and most likely, you just backed yourself into an inevitable game over.
One thing Kingdom would benefit majorly from is assigning specific structures to workers manually, and perhaps a recall button to get npcs inside walls whenever you need them; losing your workers/archers becomes very costly in the long run and there's nothing you can do about it.
Overall I enjoyed Kingdom as a game - the pixelated artstyle is gorgeous, the music is minimalistic and soothing and like I said, the gameplay has so much potential to be both simple and strategic; you only have 3 controls - move left, move right and drop coins to buy something.
But its inherent flaws make it frustrating to play at times and players having to start from scratch every time after a game over, even if it's the fault of the AI, brings the game down.
I first tried it on Epic Games when they gave it away, played it for a good few hours and then found out it's on Steam, I'll keep playing it from time to time but it's worth knowing the shortcomings this game has before picking it up, so you won't be too disappointed.