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Kingdom Two Crowns

And to a certain degree: The whole series
A game about figuring out if you just can't progress or if it is a bug you encountered.
Gameplay:
Kingdom Two Crowns is a game that has the interesting idea of a mix of a city builder in a sidescroll style mixed with an adventure. If this sounds strange: It is and I probably didn't manage to describe the game at all with these words and this marks the greatest strength of the series. The game feels fresh, interesting, new. I played a few games by now and have yet to find a game like this (but probably won't since they are not quite my cup of tea).
Basically you run around on your horse and use coins to tell your people to chop some tress, build some weapons, walls or towers and... I mean, that's basically it. There is not much more to the gameplay loop. And if this sounds like the worst part: Sadly it isn't yet. I have to add that this loop feels good! Constantly expanding, figuring out what to do next, what to build first, can you send out more workers or will they die because the monsters come at night, can I skip another wall or will this lead to my workers dieing to the monsters because they ran too far. It's a good concept and I've had my fun with it, even though it got repetetive pretty darn fast.
The biggest problem of the game sadly comes with it's biggest strength: You can't control your workers intelligently, especially in Coop they sometimes run from one end of your 2-sided base to the other, back and forth and back and forth, which feels pretty bad and often enough ends up deadly. Even worse though is the one thing that I couldn't get out of my head: What the heck am I even doing? The game doesn't explain anything to you except for the easiest button prompts. You will encounter buildings with strange emeralds that you don't receive, you can't upgrade your walls or towers because... you need an axe in a tree? Also something about a horn? Wait a second, now I have an emerald and I can carry another person with me... doing absolutely nothing? Oh, cool, a boa........ And I left my island. Which COULD be a cool game about figuring out what to do becomes a frustrating task of doing an island and then leaving it half baked feeling like you are on a fetch quest just constantly repeating island after island after island after island until you have enough "Meta Game Currency" to finish the game? I never got there, but that had other reasons too, more on that later.
Balancing:
Another big problem lies in the balancing, especially in the 4 seasons. While you have 3 seasons (somethign the game never tells you) where everything is fine, you kill some animals, develope agriculture, sunbath (okay I made that one up), you will then pretty much without a warning enter the fourth season: Winter. And the game comes to an abrupt halt. Nothing works anymore, you run out of money in mere hours without any income and if you have had the bad luck of jsut recently switching to a new island you can basically jsut leave your PC running and go play some soccer outside because there is literally nothing you can do to prevent from being slowly overrun by monsters. While winter isn't a guaranteed death, it can be if you made a choice that you didn't knew you were doing.
Now the problem is: Except for winter the game is a walk in the park featuring no challenge after you have figured out the games core loop, which takes less then an hour to understand. So no, this is not a gritty survival-sidescroller. It's just badly explained and even worse balanced. This is not a "soulslike-city-builder".
Music, graphic and technical stuff:
While the music is good, if repetetive, and the graphics are fine, if you don't mind the 2D-style, the technical stuff... it's a desaster. Even years after it's release the game bugged out on me several times with gamebreaking bugs. Sometimes a tree just wouldn't get felled so you couldn't advance into one of the two sides. Sometimes you have had to take a dozend tries to connect to your Coop-Partner. And then, one faithful time, my workers just wouldn't continue building my boat, so I was effectively deadlocked. I would have had to wait for SEASONS until the enemies finally managed to overrun my city so I could die and get sent to an earlier island. And this bug, 5 years after the games initial release, is an absolute No-Go.
The craziest thing about the graphic though is this: You always have these gorgeous backgrounds of massive mountains with viking faces or giants being slayed by a spear higher then the sky and I couldnt stop myself from thinking: Why can't I play THIS game instead?
Summary:
While the game features an interesting concept that I loved to explore, with really good graphics and music, the core gameplayloop was not only repetetive and unbalanced, it was plain broken. If not for that, you could get a few fun hours out of this game. But as it stands right now, 5 years after its release, I still can't recommend the game and would rather get a refund.