Kingdoms and Castles is a base building game that I really wanted to like. I like base-building games, a welcome escape from my normal fare of action and adventure, and where else could I build a tower so high that it could target almost the entire map to defend my kingdom from dragons and vikings? Alas, while this is a fun aspect of the game that feels somewhat rewarding, the entire game can't help but feel bland and tedious to play, with every playthrough being played the same way.
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| Even though my funding and happiness woes were a constant source of frustration, it was always nice to take a moment to overlook my functional-appearing kingdom in it's stoic glory. Pay no attention to the deserter notices. |
The core gameplay of
Kingdoms and Castles involves you, a monarch of a secluded island kingdom setting up your own kingdom in the fringes of the known world (but that's not important because you don't ever interact with other kingdoms). It's your job to build a mighty kingdom that can withstand dragons and viking/ogre raids from a small hamlet, but that comes later. You build on a grid system, which does help somewhat with city planning, though to save frustration you should start right next to a forest, rocks, and iron. Your first order of business is to create farms, shelter, and production to produce necessities for your peasants. Constructing buildings that you generally build more than one of, such as roads and farms, are handled pretty well, taking resources out of your stockpile as you drag, allowing you to see just how much you can build at any given time. Soon your concerns are expanded to ensuring that all your buildings are close enough to wells, your citizens are happy, and you're making enough money to maintain your defenses and services. This is all on top of the basic necessities before attacks enter the mix, and the attacks can easily ruin your day. Vikings can steal your gold, ogres can cut a swath through your kingdom, and dragons can burn whole swaths of it, fun stuff. For me, I found the funding of my defenses to be the hardest to pull off though, for while you can have a high tax rate, the peasants are essentially no-hopers after thirty percent. I did a bit of reading after I grew frustrated with my kingdom to determine what I was doing wrong, and it turns out that my fatal blunder was that I didn't have a bustling metropolis of people before creating defenses. At that point though, combined with my own unknowing planning mistakes, rendered Summerhold a failure, so I began anew. In my second kingdom I ran across a different problem, I was simply bored. I had already done pretty much everything there was to do in the game after my first kingdom, for I had already built nearly every building (except for the statues and some upgrade buildings) and made a citadel that so far no force except empty coffers could conquer. This is the main problem with the game, every game plays out the same, sure on the hard map you have a smaller margin of error, but besides that it plays the same.
Kingdoms and Castles doesn't play badly, quite the opposite, but the flow of gameplay plays out the same way no matter how you play. On top of that there's no real alternate methods to attain resources or otherwise play the game than what you have, so the first time you play will be the same as your third and so on.
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| My second attempt, and this time with much better organization. |
Technically this game isn't bad to look at or play, but it just feels similar to any one of the hundreds of bright pastel-colored voxel games that have come out since the early 2010's. The music is alright, the graphics are decent (simple cubic 3-D with game-piece-like peasants), but there's just really nothing that makes it stand out. It's only the fact that I don't play many planners that saved this game from being immediately forgotten. I don't remember the title, I only remember that this was the voxel planner, which is all that needs to be said. Looking at your kingdom run in real time is nice to watch, especially when it looks like a real kingdom (that isn't a day away from not being able to meet payroll), but there's only so much you can do that before the novelty wears off. It does run quite well on a Mac laptop, so it has performance on its side. So there we have it, it runs well, has a pleasant look at times with your own effort, but is otherwise unremarkable, gotcha.
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| The effects of poor planning will cause you to have to create outposts which constantly must be rebuilt after the viking raids. Fun times. |
Kingdoms and Castles, compared to other base-builders like
Banished and
Rimworld, is a game that I found to be boring after the first playthrough. To the dev's credit though, they are still releasing content for the game and expanding the currently limited gameplay with more dimensions, though these seem to be in the same one-way design as the base gameplay. It's just bland after the first town, but is otherwise a decent game, so you could do worse. At least you can always build a big-ass tower at some point, but beyond that there's really no staying power.
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