Kingdoms and Castles Review (Molemanorama)
I would give this game a 7/10 for potential.
Pros:
-Fun for creative types
-Decent art style
-Good concept
-Decent City Management for a Casual Player
Cons:
-Lacks Content
-Lacks AI
-Lacks Challenge
-REQUIRES Improvements
Improvements?
- Could use some cost tweaks for early game buildings, especially a Forester building.
- Potential to add things like wizards, clerics, paladins, druids, rogues...
- Potential to add things like a sewer system beneath the city, buildings for the units above, wild game hunting for food source.
- Upgrades to existing buildings in the UI... (improved arrow turret, balista, windmills, taverns, etc. )
- Add a "Boss" wave of enemies and add some variance to the rate that vikings and dragons attack. (both started arriving simultaneously, and it stuck that way)
- More options for existing buildings, such as a large graveyard...
- Castle options to simplify costs of building towers or allow for planning out walls/castle areas, new turret types, etc...
- A non-building plotting tool for laying out where you want future buildings to go so you can plan out a city better.
Review:
I enjoyed Kingdoms and Castles and will probably play a bit more of it to hit achievements and efficiency goals. What I found was not terrible, and in fact had some major potential. The game needs a bit of work in several departments. I think that some aspects that could add a ton of enjoyment would be things like AI scripting for your recruits, so they will actually go fight the incoming vikings. I would like to see more buildings that maybe creates a new unit type or new hero type. I was playing for years on purpose with a low population to prevent the first wave of vikings. This allowed me to build up a huge castle area before building more houses. I forced the game to delay those attacks by not building houses. After it was just wait for the waves and shoot them down whiles expanding the castle.
I finally got to a mid-game population, and built heroes and mercs. When I placed them on the road into town, they wouldn't attack the vikings coming into the town on their own, and half the town caught on fire. The AI of your units is no-existant other than plant, harvest, repeat. There was also a lack of risk with the raids of dragons and vikings. There should be a loss of gold or other resource when they raid and pillage, but instead, they just burn stuff. The game also seems to think that a disease or food shortage is a good way to amp up the difficulty... When people got sick, the plague ended in seconds due to the hospital, but the happiness of the entire town dropped over it. My favorite was when the graneries were full to the brim, yet somehow there was a massive food shortage. This is false difficulty in game design and it is kind of bad. The developer needs to consider making a lot of the buildings capable of getting an upgrade. For example, once you build a balista, you should be able to pay to upgrade the range, damage, or add effects of it. Some quality of life improvements would go a long way.
I'm just hoping that as they complete more of the game that the game gets fleshed out a bit more than it currently is. For that, I give the game a 7/10... if there are no further improvements, then that drops to a 5/10. Adding about twice as much would make it feel like a better game and improve the value.