Kingdoms and Castles Title

Kingdoms and Castles Review

Kingdoms and Castles is a charmingly cute medieval city building indie game from Lion Shield Studios that also features tower defence elements.

Kingdoms and Castles is a city building game in the medieval theme, so there’s the usual range of housing, taverns, mines and farms. Each of these either generates or processes resources. These resources then can be used to help expand further in the world. The challenge is in ensuring you’ve got enough resources to feed your population and still expand outwards.

Kingdoms and Castles Start

This is made more of a challenge by the game’s weather system. Every so often, there’ll be heavy rain. These have a chance of flooding your fields. The flooded fields provide no resources, so the villagers have to rely on their stockpiled resources. Not enough resources and they starve to death. That will then make the survivors unhappy, which may result in them abandoning your kingdom. So far, the player has to deal with the map, the weather and resources as they expand.

Then come the tower defense elements. Every so often, a dragon will appear in the sky as an event. The dragon will circle around and maybe set some buildings on fire. If the player has built castle towers with ballista or archers, they will fire on the dragon when it’s close. Take down the dragon, you avoid burninating the countryside and making your villagers unhappy.

If it’s not a dragon, the alert will signal the incoming longboats of the Vikings. These will sail the coasts and rivers and unload a horde of Vikings on your lands. If the Vikings reach the towns, they will set fire to buildings. This is obviously bad. As well as the towers, citizens can be trained into soldiers for defence. They will mill around under the command of a knight, and attack any Viking in a nearby area. As the game progresses on harder difficulties, the Vikings will become more frequent and numerous. They’ll also bring ogres with them to knock down your castle walls and towers. This requires a constant escalation and monitoring of your defences to avoid your kingdom being raided.

Kingdoms and Castles Vikings

Overall, the base game is great. It’s a straightforward town building game. Laying out roads and structures is easy. The addition of the tower defence elements add a ticking clock that focuses the players attention. The graphical style is very blocky and clean. The developers have utilised a small colour palette in order to reduce clutter on the map. This then continues into the models. The villagers, knights, resources and every object in the game looks like a wooden game piece from something like Catan. This gives the whole game the feeling of a toybox.

This then is reinforced by the animation. Villagers skim across the map. My favourite thing is when the player checks the a granary storage. The top tilts off on a hinge then flips back. There’s more in terms of the villagers moving around and in their response to fires. They shuffle to a well, pick up a block of water and just spray it at the fire. It’s cute.

Kingdoms and Castles Granary

There’s a few issues with the game as it stands. It’s very trial and error. There is there no tutorial on any element of the game. The game is expecting you to accept that you will fail and start again. The problem with this is it can be an hour or two in before you realise that you’ve snookered yourself. Removing all the trees on a landmass without placing some forester buildings results in a slow death by lack of resources.

Similarly, if you place your castle down far away from an iron source, 45 minutes in, you’ll be unable to progress without finding one. Where beginners might find the game difficult to start, building game veterans may find the game difficult to parse. The clean and simple aesthetic extends to the interface. This means a lack of detailed information on what’s going on. This isn’t really a flaw in the sense that the systems aren’t overly complex, but for those who like to fine tune their game, it’s a little Spartan.

Taking that into consideration though, for only £6.99? Kingdoms and Castles is fantastic. It’s very cute and charming. It’s got a solid foundation of two complimentary mechanical systems. Even better than that, the developers have said that they will be supporting the game in an ongoing fashion. There’s plans for a port/trading system, as well as other updates. It’s promising. All in all, there’s a whole lot to like in Kingdoms and Castles.