Kingdom: Classic
This game is simple, but addicting. I wasn’t sure it will last me for more than few hours, and I usually don’t approach games thinking that I’ll stay up all night playing, but I got lucky here. This game is all about management and choices. It’ll start innocent, but quickly becomes pure evil the more you hold on.
Gameplay
You control most of the things indirectly. You’ll start small, and you’ll make a lot of mistakes while trying to get bigger. I can’t promise you that you’ll get hooked the same way I did, but after having few tries on my own, I’ve started seeing the game differently. It is based around trying it over and over, and I didn’t get sick of it. Despite what I’ve heard, every part, even the beginning, becomes an endurance run. Since you have to control everything, you can’t stop.
– Real player with 95.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim Pixel Graphics Games.
So, after over 40 hours spent playing the game I felt it’s time to finally write a review.
First of all, I really enjoy this game tremendously, but I’d say it’s not for everyone. If you read other reviews, you probably have a good idea what the good part of the game is, nice art, awesome soundtrack (first time I ever bought a game OST, and not regretting it one bit). These are the two things I think everyone can agree about.
Then it gets more tricky. The gameplay isn’t for everyone. It’s literally discover everything for yourself. including how your own guys behave, even how your own horse behaves.
– Real player with 49.3 hrs in game
Knights and Merchants
Great Nostalgia, as I played the original game ~2000 when I was a kid. If you already played this game, you can’t do much wrong buying it again, it contains both campaigns (The Shattered Kingdom [TSK] & The Peasants Rebellion [TPR]) which should take ~50hrs of raw speedrunning if you still know the concept of the game.
There is a problem though: This is NOT the original game from 2000! It’s a remake with a hell of new bugs and changes (esp. if you played TSK and didn’t own the Gold Edition)
Some things I noticed:
– Real player with 148.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim Medieval Games.
If The Settlers and Dark Souls had a love child, it would be Knights and Merchants.
I never got to play this when it was originally released in 1998, and I regret it, but the mistake has now been rectified!
K&M is an old school RTS/city economy builder hybrid. The concept is simple, the graphics a little dated, but still good enough, the sounds are simple and your minions make cute little comments when ordered to do something. The UI is easy to understand and on the surface, it seems a simple game.
– Real player with 140.4 hrs in game
Buoyancy
Buoyancy has something special going for it for sure, you know this within the few hours playing it.
However at the 6hr mark (at least for me) I felt like I had already experienced all of the game mechanics and all of the challenge was gone. Population was easy to maintain (even passed 150 pop) and everything else started to repeat itself. The pirates towards the end really weren’t a threat nor were fires and extreme weather threats.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this, especially because it’s a early access title and the low price point still provides decent value. I can’t say this enough, but games like this is exactly why I love early access. Buoyancy is a gem!
– Real player with 33.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Colony Sim Early Access Games.
Its still in development but and I have high hopes for it in the future but right now its pretty dumb. For a full explanation continue reading.
Its virtually impossible to set up steady food production because the villagers you have working on water, wheat, bread, beer (yes beer) all the necessary things to keep the colony going just randomly quit there jobs and wonder off. Once your population reaches a couple or three hundred you are pretty much guaranteed to have one of these situation which results in running out of food faster than you can get all the villagers back to work and as a result dozens or hundreds die. Now to get to this point you had to build a large raft. You need a lot of villagers to row the raft around to collect supplies from the ocean. Once you lose a sizable chunk due to one of these wandering abandonments of duties you don’t even have enough people left to row the raft and are basically done.
– Real player with 32.4 hrs in game
Empires of the Undergrowth
One of my favorite indie games. While only in early access, it easily has several hours worth of content already.
Four colony types are available as of posting, with more to be released in the future, each with its own unique features. The ereptor, gene thief ants, a fictional species that allows the player to mix in other ant species and their abilities; the fusca, black ants, which act as an introductory species with basic worker and soldier roles; the rufa, wood ants, which split their soldiers between defensive and offensive roles; the atta, leaf cutter ants, which have a unique resource system involving gathering, food production, and waste disposal, as well as four castes to make resources and combat more dynamic.
– Real player with 683.7 hrs in game
This game is great and is most likely to be enjoyed by fans of the real time strategy genre. Currently there are 4 levels each with a challenge mode and many difficulty settings which you will tackle as you control two different species of ant colony. The ants must collect food to grow their colony which can in itself have various different methods applied such as the strategic placement of tiles for upgrading purposes to the ratio of worker ants to warrior ants so that they can defeat the many hungry predators around them which seek to devour their queen! For those who like a challenge you will get quite a bit of enjoyment and playtime from tackling the hardest versions of these levels as for others this will be a shorter 2-3 hour experience which will be enjoyable nonetheless. inbetween these levels you will visit your formicariam (ANT TANK) where your success in these levels provides resources for your main colony which is a species of ant that can take the genes from other ant species and have their queen produce them within the colony. This formicarium colony itself has two challenges to face which are kind of like a hoard mode. If you finish all of this content and are still eager for more there are a handfull of other modes which may entertain for awhile such as the demo levels (earlier levels with a more basic concept), arena mode (a mode where you can pit various creatures found in the game against each other) and Freeplay mode (where you start a colony on one of two maps with many options for you to tweak for a customised experience which is scored upon the defeat of your colony) and finally the hungry spider level which sees you take control of the one of the ants most deadly predators THE WOLF SPIDER! (This is a slight genre flip as you control the one spider which grows and levels as you defeat enemies working your way up to bringing down other huge predators.) I very highly reccomend this game and support the development team who are constantly keeping the community around the game informed on what they are working on next.
– Real player with 281.9 hrs in game
Kingdoms and Castles
–-{Graphics}—
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☑ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ Paint.exe
—{Gameplay}—
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It‘s just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Starring at walls is better
☐ Just don‘t
—{Audio}—
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ Earrape
—{Audience}—
☐ Kids
☐ Teens
☐ Adults
☑ Human
—{PC Requirements}—
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boiiiiii
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
—{Difficulity}—
– Real player with 110.0 hrs in game
Extremely fun. Easy to pick up and put down AND come back to.
– Real player with 71.9 hrs in game
Rise to Ruins
Well I’ve just about hit 450 hours, and so far I have to say I’m enjoying this. Overall its a decent little balance of Tower Defense, City Builder, and Survival Sim. Don’t be fooled by the basic bitpixel appearance, This is a relatively intuitive game with a lot of sprites, particle effects , and pathfinding(literally). The Dev has been pretty active on the forums and in discussion and seems genuinely invested in the success of his game, and in this day and age that alone speaks volumes.
SUMMARY
– Real player with 448.5 hrs in game
Rise to Ruins first experience:
Day 1: Wow there’s a lot of stuff I can build!
Day 2: There’s a lot of stuff I need to build!
Day 3: There’s a lot of stuff I wish I had built!
… Day 1 (Again): Okay.. There’s a lot of stuff I need to build!
This review is split into 2 segments, the pros and cons here at the top, followed by a summation. This is an EARLY ACCESS review, please consider that going forward. especially in regard to content depth/width.
Pros -
*** Good aesthetic-**
– Real player with 391.1 hrs in game
Surviving Mars
A new developer took over in September 2021 and they have trashed the game with bugs; just the base game, I’m not even talking about the disastrous expansion (85% negative reviews!!). 2 months and 4 ‘hot’ fixes later and the game is still so broken that I would prefer a rollback over anything the new developers have done, if only such an option were available.
They have started working on ‘content packs’ now.
I was in the middle of a game, trying for some outstanding achievements when the mandatory updates applied. I would remove this negative review if I had a way to roll back to the previous version.
– Real player with 955.9 hrs in game
Abstraction Games is ruining this game. It is my favorite game - even now. Yet, as time progresses, Abstraction keeps introducing more and more bugs into this game - at least for the Linux version. They also seem to just add more features that don’t really contribute to the overall experience.
If Steam would let me roll back to the pre-March 2021 release, I would.
– Real player with 296.3 hrs in game
Kingdom Two Crowns
I do not have the capacity to explain it in detail at this time, but the quick takeaway is I cannot recommend this game. Good concept, but having to fight glitches/bugs and the occasional bit of anti-player design ruins the experience and makes it drag into terribleness. If you have hearing issues, please be advised that there are key cues that are audio-based without any caption options. If you are colorblind, you will find the visual design even more challenging/impossible and again, there are no accessibility options. Considering that settings rarely stick between game loads, I’m not even sure that adding them would even fix anything. Also, adding new achievements at a later time and locking them behind a paid DLC is not great. In any case, sorry, but I would advise avoiding.
– Real player with 239.1 hrs in game
Short version:
- Basically tower defense done at its best.
Long version:
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During the day you explore the current island (yes, there are several).
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Build up your defenses in the form of recruiting peasants for your army and build walls/towers.
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Survive the night when the Greed come (a well named enemy that steels your coins).
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Unlock new building/peasant tech and rid-able mounts on the current island.
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Build a ship.
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Move to the next Island.
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Repeat former steps until strong enough to return to the first Island.
– Real player with 116.3 hrs in game
Kingdom: New Lands
An otherwise simple and fun little survival game ruined by frustrating mechanics.
Kingdom: New Lands is a simple survival sort of game. From what the tutorial, in the form of the previous ghostly monarch, tells you in small words, you have to “Build, Expand, Defend” It’s fun at first, you have a couple citizens, you buy tools to make them builders or hunters, and you build, expand, and defend, and than you might just have doomed yourself already.
First off, everything in this game is done by the power of money, you use coin to do everything, and anything. If you don’t have any coin, you can’t do a single thing but wait. Through the final words, build, expand, and defend, your first run may have you do just that, build your walls, expand them, than defend at night. First wave comes, it’s easy and you survive. All seems well unless you’ve fallen into a major mechanic the game hasen’t told you. You realize your hunters arn’t making any coin, which is because you may of over-expanded and now those little rabbit spawn points are behind your walls, which makes them despawn, therefor killing your economy. Thankfully there’s some treasure chest around the map to give you more coin to do things, so if you thought to explore and find them, you can play a little longer.
– Real player with 68.5 hrs in game
Summary: Even more waiting and more RNG
Multiplayer: No
Completion: 19 hrs (previous experience)
Cards: Yes
Cloud:Yes
Kingdom: New Lands is the sequel to Kingdom: Classic and is bigger in scope in every way. Much of what I said for Kingdom: Classic holds true for Kingdom: New Lands as well, but there are quite a few changes that need to be addressed.
First of all there’s multiple stages this time around. The victory condition in this game typically involves rebuilding the ship (around 50-120 gold) to sail to the next island (up until Skull Island). You may ferry over a handful of troops and builders to the next island, so carry what you can, because you’ll need it.
– Real player with 54.5 hrs in game
Frostpunk
Dear God, yes I recommend. I’m fucking obsessed with this game. It dominates my every goddamn thought nowadays. I don’t think I’ve ever been so obsessed with a game before in my life. If you’re reading this, buy the game. Buy the DLC’s. And somehow contain your excitement for Frostpunk 2.
– Real player with 329.4 hrs in game
The Good:
-
Special and creative gameplay will make just enough to enjoy the game in Easy and Normal mode but also very very difficult and hardcore in Hard, Extreme, Survival mode.
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Detailed images, map design make you really feel the “frost” of the game
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Each map has its own story and gameplay.
-
Nice background music.
The Bad:
- The gameplay is hard to get used to for newbies (I gave up 3 times because I couldn’t understand the game, but it wasn’t until the 4th time that I felt the fun of it because I believe 11 bit studios can always make a good one).
– Real player with 152.1 hrs in game