izigame.me

I found Kingsgrave to be a very charming and enjoyable game. The core gameplay loop is explore, fight, solve puzzles, obtain new abilities, gear and upgrades and rebuild your kingdom using the resources you find and survivors you rescue along the way. Retaking your lands from the monsters in the wilds and seeing the fog on your map dissipate is satisfying and gives a sense of clear progression during play, as is restoring ruined towns, outposts and monuments, benefiting you directly in the process. There was a point where I was worried that I had soft-locked my upgrades by converting all of my iron into steel early, but there is a semi-hidden area that allows you to purchase otherwise finite resources to fix that, you just have to explore to find it.
Combat isn't incredibly deep but not shallow either. Individual weapons are better against certain categories of enemies than others, and via their upgrade trees have different utilities such as bleed, stun, charge attack or specing into hybrid damage types (for example, converting the King's scepter into a morning star with both bludgeoning and piercing damage). Weapons are also useful as tools for puzzles or exploration, the ax breaks through a few barriers, elemental weapons can solve puzzles and the shield sees more use as a traversal tool than in combat prior to upgrades.
Most of said puzzles aren't too difficult, bar a couple multi-lever head-scratchers. They're more about incentivising exploration and interacting with your environment in unique ways.
Story is pretty bare-bones. You're just given the basic 'here's the problem, it's up to you to fix it' without much explanation. Though going adventuring as a literal king in full regal attire, braining monstrous abominations to death with the very symbol of your authority in order to save your countrymen and restore what is yours by divine right is pretty cool. There are no knights or soldiers to fight your battles instead, it's up to you to roll up your sleeves and get your hands bloody in order to save the kingdom. The concept has been done before, but the way it's presented is nice and fresh and just make you wanna root for the King's success all the more. That said the ending was pretty lackluster, and while it looks like there should be multiple endings, there isn't.
There are a few minor bugs. A few achievements wouldn't proc when they should have, and only would after I killed the next enemy. And one achievement has a misleading name (it's actually spike traps, not thorns) which is also technically possible to softlock yourself out of in a playthrough via an upgrade (though you can get it withing a few minutes on a different file). A couple of instances where enemy sprites or health bars didn't disappear, but other than that nothing happened to hurt my game experience and 100% was accomplished with negligible grind.
In short, I liked Kingsgrave. Felt a bit like playing a classic Zelda game with the setting, vibe and art style; its shortcomings didn't spoil my overall experience and enjoyment of the game and therefore I can see myself coming back to replay it at a latter time.