Kingdom Review

Kingdom tells you virtually nothing about how it works. Figuring it out through trial and error is most of the joy of playing, and the threat of permanent death gives it its tension. That’s why I’m not going to tell you much about how things work in this review – and if you intend to play, I urge you not to watch Let’s Plays or read wikis first. (But if you must, I’ve included some footage above.)

The way you build up your kingdom from campfire to sprawling empire is interestingly abstract, since your mounted monarch character (who is randomly portrayed as a king or queen of one of several ethnicities) is powerless to directly interact with the world. All you can do is move left, move right, and decide where to spend money on resources and defenses. Your citizens do the rest. You can’t even defend yourself against enemies, other than running away – you have to rely on the often comically inept archers to eventually hit their targets. That makes every moment you’re exploring beyond your walls dangerous.

Kingdom looks pretty good in stills, but great in motion.

A coin purse in the corner of the screen quaintly represents your treasury by showing individual coins rather than a sterile number, and that, combined with coin slots that appear above items representing their costs, the position of the sun or moon in the sky, and a bell that signals the start of a new day are pretty much the extent of what Kingdom tells you about where you stand in the world. That lack of information is refreshing – knowing that time is passing everywhere in the world, but you’re only aware of a small fraction of it at a time gives surveying your territory a sense of urgency.

And this art is almost all gorgeous. Animations are full of character, everything you do is reflected in the water below, weather effects make nearly every day and night feel different, enemies are frightening, and the music is fantastically atmospheric. A run of Kingdom can take several hours, and I was constantly impressed at how many new vistas it presented me with. The one place it notably fails is in its basic civilians, who are ugly blobs, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell what their status is

My early games were full of tension. There are moments when you’re out exploring in the perpetual darkness of the forest when you realize you have no idea what time it is, and that any moment night could fall and you could be swarmed. And on some nights, when the blood moon randomly rises, you just have to hope your defenses can hold against a massive onslaught.  Permanent death makes the stakes feel high.

When you’re successful, though, Kingdom starts to drag. Galloping from one side to the other can take basically a whole day, and that’s not very fun. When there’s so much going on, I found myself resenting the sparse interface – I wanted to know how many soldiers I had, how many farmers, how many builders, and how many unemployed citizens, without having to go through and do a manual headcount. And without spoiling the means by which you stop the flow of enemies, it becomes a repetitive exercise that requires a lot of buildup.

Enemies want your money, not your life.

Also, once I figured out the dos and don’ts over about 12 hours of intense play, winning became trivial. You can strive to win in a smaller number of days than before, but much of that is down to how many resources you have readily available in the beginning and the frequency of the random blood moons, which makes it more a matter of luck than a test of skill. And sadly, randomizing the handful of terrain and resource elements that comprise the map can’t make Kingdom fun, mysterious, and challenging again.