Someone got me Kingdoms: New Lands for Christmas.
Apologies if you actually like this game but.....
Holy shit. It's been a while since I've played a game whose very design fills me with such contempt.
It's a beautiful, artistic looking game with amazing pixel art and good music.
But the design choices in how the game is played feel like a deliberate attempt to waste my time and make the game unfun to play through.
It's a side scroller, where you run back and forth on your horse, ordering stuff to be built, recruiting peasants and assigning them duties and collecting money, always trying to expand your little kingdom outwards. That's basically all of game play.
Which would be thin on its own merits. Where it really pisses me off though is that none of what you can do as a player scales up as your kingdom grows. There's a day / night cycle, which means as your kingdom grows, you start spending more of each day just running back and forth across it.
What you can expand your kingdom out with is random in each game. So it might be fields to grow crops in, rocky outcrops to build an archer platform on or new walls that tell your guys where the edge of your kingdom is.
When the monsters come, they throw themselves at the outer most wall of your kingdom. If you've got archers, they'll stand there and shoot arrows with _random ballistic trajectory_ until either the monsters are dead, they break through, or day comes and they fuck off.
Likewise you can build a catapult that will absolutely waste monsters....WHEN it decides to actually hit them, because it too also has random ballistic trajectory.
Things seem fine for the first few days. But as soon as the monsters ramp up, they quickly smash down your walls. Once they do that, they mob all your soldiers, who make no attempt to flee and can't defend themselves at all. When they touch your guys, they bust them down to peasants, and steal their rather expensive gear and go charging deeper into your kingdom.
The absolute frustration sets in when you realize that, as your kingdom grows, the amount of time it takes your peasants to return to the castle so they can have their duties reassigned just continues to get longer and longer, setting you back that much more. The amount of money it takes to restore them to their assigned jobs means you have to spend that much more time riding back and forth across your kingdom collecting cash.
Meanwhile, in your first play through you will eventually learn (because the game doesn't tell you) that your mission is to find a boat at the extreme edges of the game map, sink a ton of money in to it so your builders will repair it, so they can eventually push it to the very edge of the map so you can sail away to another island and....start the whole process over again.
So rather than the relaxing kingdom building game it present itself as, it's a time trial, basically. Take too many days to find the ship and repair it, and the monsters will overwhelm your ability to maintain, because your guys are so shit and expansion actively makes it harder to recover from a big loss. You get almost no meaningful choices to make, and things that look like they should help like the archer platforms are both random in where they can go, which means you usually expand right past them so they stop being useful, AND they basically can't kill more than 1 or so monsters before they go running past its effective range. The best tool you get for defense, the catapult, you get exactly two of, one pointing each direction on the map. If that gets destroyed, the amount of time it takes to rebuild it and slowly push it back in to position means beyond a certain size of kingdom, the catapult also no longer becomes an effective defense tool once it's been destroyed.
It's like....whoever made this game looked at their AI, looked at the actions a player could take and just went "nah, fuck them." I've never felt a game so deliberately curtail what the player can do in the name of making it difficult. All the tweaks you'd expect a game like this to make to balance out the challenge, K:NL actively chooses not to do. Make the peasants run home faster. Give the player the ability to build things of their own volition where they would be most helpful like the game has some actual strategy. Allow the player to automatically collect some amount of money instead of having to ride around like a glorified tax man (which is 99% of gameplay.) Give the AI better than a 50% chance of actually hitting its targets. Allow players to deconstruct things that are no longer useful where they are. Allow you to relocate the job assignment stations closer to where the action is. The game allows for none of these things.
It's just, once you figure out how to play, a mad scramble to expand as fast as you can, find that boat, get it built and get off the island.
It feels like a complete bait and switch. What looks like it should be a low key kingdom builder on PC is actually a garbage mobile game time waster with several hard coded doom clocks and where all the challenge comes from what it deliberately DOESN'T do rather than what it does do.
I'm glad someone got this for me, because if I'd paid $15 for this fucking game I'd be livid.
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Topic: What are you currently playing? (Read 192612 times)