Kingdoms and Castles by developer and publisher Lion Shield,LLC—Microsoft Xbox Series X review written byNickwith a copy provided by thepublisher.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Kingdoms and Castles is one of those titles I hadn’t heardmuch about but has turned out to be a very pleasant surprise as what I can onlydescribe as a sort of laid-back city building simulation experience. It took mea bit of time to wrap my head around a few of the mechanics, but once I gotgoing with it, Kingdoms and Castles was a smooth, enjoyable experience.
Right off of the bat, it’s clear that the devs give you adecent amount of control over your experience. You can choose how big your mapis, how many opponents you want and even if you want aggressive opponents ornot. While it’s somewhat standard stuff in a lot of games like this, it’s stillhandled well and frankly I appreciated having the opportunity to learn the game’smechanics without the stressors of competition right out of the gates.
That was probably the right call for me as well, asinitially I didn’t really know what I was doing. There’s brief bits of tutorialthat pop up here and there, but Kingdoms and Castles didn’t go holding my handthrough the early rounds of gameplay. I chose where to create my castle andthen highlighted a big chunk of woods and watched my people go about choppingit down. Once I had lumber, I started to lay out buildings that I wanted andgrew at least a little puzzled as one process began and the other seemed tohalt. I then found the menu that allowed me to prioritize which kinds of workmy people were doing, and to control how many of them went into a particulararea of focus. For example, I can send the entirety of my kingdom off to chopdown trees, but then who is going to build the homes, tend the orchards andperform other tasks as needed?
Kingdoms and Castles is similar to other city builders inthat resource management is key, but there’s an additional layer of resourcemanagement in your people management as well. It felt a bit finicky early on asI had a handful of bad experiences: flooding took out some farming plots, afire ruined some buildings off at one end of the land and I couldn’t seem toget my people focused on the things I wanted to prioritize – at first.
Because I had chosen the enemy-less route right off of thebat, I learned how to balance things pretty well… or so I thought. Admittedlythough, things began to run a bit stale as my only real obstacle seemed to becitizens who were never really content. Give them a home, and then they wantfood. Feed them and then they want churches and festival grounds and a varietyof other things that I gained access to as I steadily ramped up the number ofpeople I had doing different things, unlocking new types of technology andstructures along the way. I then decided it was time to spin this up again,with some proper antagonists. I won’t go into great detail, but I’ll say thatthe gist of it is: I had plenty more to learn.
The thing is, I kept playing. I wanted to learn how to domore. Kingdoms and Castles is nowhere near as densely designed and complicatedas some of the city builders out there like Civilization 5, and that’s okay.There’s a simplicity to the visuals, music and interface that compliments the gameplayand creates a sort of pleasant harmony throughout the experience. It doesn’thave the tactical depth of a lot of other titles in the genre, but in a way,this was perfect for me during my vacation time because it was easier to learnwithout some of the frustrations that can come with the genre during theearlier learning periods. I screwed up early on, but seldom felt frustrated orthat the experience was cheap and unfair.
Kingdoms and Castles does have some room to grow. The AI is veryartificial but seldom very intelligent. Over a handful of different games, itfelt like the same patterns emerged both in how they interacted with me and howthey went about building up their own kingdoms. There’s a behind the scenesscript at play here that the computer generally sticks to. That’s not a badthing necessarily as it seems well-balanced and makes the gameplay experienceenjoyable, but it does tease into that concern that long-term, Kingdoms andCastles might feel somewhat shallow compared to its contemporaries and the shelflife of the title could be shorter than them.
If I had to sum this title up in a word, I'd go with: Charming. Kingdoms and Castles is a fun experiencethat works surprisingly well with a controller on a console. There’s plenty todo and learn, and while the depth of systems and presentation didn’t blow meaway, the key here was that I by and large enjoyed my time with the title.There’s a somewhat more relaxed pace to be had here, and that suited me justfine as I found hours melting away rather effortlessly.
Score: 7 / 10
