Kingdom (2015)

The game works surprisingly well despite its simple system. Unfortunately, it has a very short life span - but before it gets tedious, it´s great. [Issue#260]

It needs time, but if you pour a few hours into it you'll find a very interesting and compelling strategy game.

Ultimately Kingdom is a game that’s easy to love. Combining exploration, micromanagement and strategy in a way that continually feels personal and intimate is no easy task, but it achieves it by forcing you to do everything yourself.

A simple yet entertaining "city builder" that'll provide a difficult challenge.

Kingdom is a small, charming and surprisingly difficult base builder with beautiful pixelart.

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.

It's a niche game, no doubt about that. On the other hand, the contemplation it offers is sometimes really unique.

An RTS disguised as a 2D platformer. Sounds weird but works surprisingly well. [13/2015, p.65]

Charming and fascinating, Kingdom ultimately lacks depth. With more variables to tinker with, the replayability would simply skyrocket.

2D strategy has a surprisingly excellent core, which unfortunately lacks larger amount of content. Kingdom is the really funny game, but not for a longer period of time.

Kingdom very cleverly reduces a complex genre down to something digestible, but that same simplification struggles against its later scope.

Kingdom is a fun, gorgeous management game, but trying to learn its mysteries eventually becomes a slog.

Kingdom might not look like much at first, but through great ambition, it manages to be more than your average tower defense experience. The exploration and its beautifully pixelated art style create a sense of mystery and wonder, and had it not been as repetitive, demanding that you play in more or less one single way to succeed, it could have been something much greater.

Kingdom has solid ideas that get lost in its own simplicity. It’s a little too conceptual, and I found that it had a hard time holding my attention after a few in-game days. It has a whole kingdom out there to explore, but it just isn’t varied or interesting enough to warrant the type of commitment it ask of the player.

It is essentially a tower defense game in its more simplistic form, something that is its bigger positive and drawback at the same time. It is extremely easy to build your kingdom and provide tense defense situations, but its simplicity creates many hurdles on the way those defenses could be constructed.