Kingdom.

Kingdom is a 2D pixel-art indie offering. That in itself earns it a direct 'not interested' post-it on my gamedesk. The amount of utter shyte that gets dumped upon the gamer in the 2D pixel-art indie genre is staggering if not overwhelming. An offering in the genre has to be particularly remarkable for me to seriously regard it as a thing that I would allocate time to.

Kingdom is such a game and it earns it's initial 'let's have a look then' by the fact that the pixel-art is partly coming from Licorice. Licorice knows their business in the 2D pixel-art world and work from them is always polished. When you see 2D pixel-art that looks like a milion bucks, chances are it's Licorice.

So the visuals are accounted for. It shows in everything all the way up to execution and extreme attention to detail. So what's Kingdom all about then? Kingdom is a game that revolves about a King or a Queen who seems to be exiled and who tries to establish a fresh new kingdom on their own for the mere glory, seemingly, of themselves. Whether the gamer controls a King or a Queen is game-decided and the gamer has no control over that. The King, in all his pixel-artness seems to represent George Clooney and the Queen... wears a gown, has long wavy hair and rides her horse amazonic. That kinda reminded me of the first Lara Croft movie, so I guess that the Queen represents Angelina Jolie.

Royalty and the horse it rides are having some kind of weird symbiotic relationship as the royalty never dismounts. The horse itself however is ready to be sold to the glue-factory. It gallops for the shortest distance know to man before it runs out of stamina after which it takes the longest time known to man to recouperate. This horse is the absolute bottom of the barrel and makes Seabiscuit looks like prime breedingstock.

The Kingdom is started by paying for a campfire. And it snowballs from there. The royalty earns gold by recruiting people who conveniently sit at camps waiting to be recruited. It's disappointing that recruiting has a 100% success-rate where everything else in the game is procced. This recruits will have to be divided into classes that the gamer needs to support the Kingdom. The classes are Archer, Builder and Farmer. There's a fourth class, the Knight, but the Knight is a special case that will be discussed later. Archers are the backbone of the Kingdom. They're the offence and defence and their skill is a 50% cointoss between hit or miss. The annoyance is that they can't be controlled directly or indirectly. Which is a shame, since there's an indirect way of controlling deers... Archers earn the Kingdom gold with such the royalty invests to have things build and Builders, well... build everything royalty invests in. Builders are also important as they control the ballistae. Builders are slow. Excruciatingly so. Farmers farm as soon as royalty builds them a farm and from then on serve as a secondary way to earn gold.

Every so often, the Kingdom gets attacked by a collective of monsters called the Greed. Why the Greed attacks is unexplained. They don't seem to have a lore-reason to do so. They attack because they're monsters and because they have a cool name for their collective, I guess. Monsters for the sake of having them and because of their total reasonless attacks they're so generic that the monsters could be evil knights or psychotic unicorns or paper planes with a deathwish and it wouldn't matter. Why they're called the Greed is at least obvious, they loot hammers, bows and scythes as they attack. There's no strategy to their attacks. The Greed Zerg-rush and that's it.

In keeping with being an modern indie-title which indicates creative bankruptness, the Greed attack at night and gamer-success is measured by how many nights your Kingdom survives. The Greed are gentlemen monsters as they give the gamer a few nights to rebuild the Kingdom. The Greed offset this by bringing more or stronger monsters on the next nightly attack.

The Greed attacks can be stopped by generating Knights. In order to qualify for Knights, the Kingdom has to be upgraded to stone buildings. The gamer then pays for Knights. Knights have a secondary cost in that they commandeer four archers as their back-up. The squad doesn't do anything by themselves. The gamer has to fund their campaign by paying the Knight to get his ass into gear. The squad then goes and seeks out a Greed-portal to destroy. The Greed don't take this lying down though!

There are some nice mechanics at play however. The Greed don't kill the people, but take their tools. The royalty has to spend coin to re-recruit the people and has to spend coin to resupply them. This system puts pressure on the invest to build mechanics, as the gamer will slowly come into a position where they have too much to maintain and not enough to maintain it with. The whole game is set up for the player to eventually fail with no way to actually win, which is another hallmark of modern indie-games.

Replays of the game are only relevant in the sense that the gamer can try to last longer than last time. However, the game will show everything it has in the first fifty minutes that the gamer is busy with it and it has one way to add strategy to the building-aspect: max everything. Some freshness in replays is achieved in the procced locations of resources, but once the nodes are located that's also where the freshness ends.

Conclusion: Kingdom is a nice game that falls victim to 'me so indie' mechanically. The idea is weirdly compelling until the player realises that trying to improve is pointless, while the game alludes to being winnable. Graphically and sonically the game has weirdly high production values. Kingdom shows all it's depth in first time that it is played, after that only 'try to last longer than last time' runs remain that are made even less appealing by the one-note building strategy. Kingdom further lacks a backstory and no lore on why the royalty has mortal enemies in the Greed.

Personal view: When a game can't be won it must say so on the tin. Project Zomboid can't be won, but the studio coding it is very upfront with it. You're in a zed-pocalypse and you're going to die. The result is that the audience embraced the game and took the inevitable defeat as a challenge. In Project Zomboid, you go in determined to show the game up, even knowing it is futile. Kingdom tries to fool the player into thinking that they have chance and that achieves a response directly opposite from Project Zomboid; Buy Kingdom when you can get it for a dollar or two or when you can get it for free in some bundle somewhere.