Kingdoms and Castles

Wow, a great game constantly upgrading, the only complaint would be the large viking attacks.

An enjoyable but shallow experience. Build as high towers as you want. Kill some dragons. Defeat the raiders. Farm and then starve because of the terrible pathfinding. There's a good amount of stuff to do in the beginning which slowly but surely becomes automated thanks to quarries and foresters. Past four hours of play there is nothing new or exciting occurring. It simply becomes build on all the land and get highest population. There is no trading. No outside communication. No multiple islands. It's like a cute and single island version of the Anno games. But Anno does it better. And by god the pathfinding and CPU usage of this game is pathetic. The developers need to go to Factorio optimization school. It gets one star for the artstyle, It gets one star for a fun core concept.

Let's face it, we used to (pre-covid) spend $10-20 at a movie theater for about 2 hours of enjoyment. I paid $7 for this game I just played it for 9 hours and enjoyed it a lot. And that was just the first game. I got my city up to 550 population, and could shred the dragons and vikings every time they showed up with no problem. I built everything in the menu at least once, and got the city to the point where it pretty much ran itself. Will this game have a lot of replayability? No, not really, but for $7 I hope you weren't expecting a lot. This is the kind of city builder game you pick up every 6 months and knock out a game and that's it. Especially if you aren't looking for something that will take you 60-80 hours to finish a game. One suggestion for the developer would be to work in some kind of trade thing with "nearby cities" a la Cleopatra or one of those type games. It would have been nice to sell some of my excess inventory, as well as buy a few things I needed early on. Plus it would be an excuse to make me build docks or something similar.

This looks like a nice game. Similar to Banished, but with a combat element. Yay! But, the vikings and dragons are a pain to defend against. They just roam around without real purpose breaking your stuff as they go along. They don't loot or actually do anything. So when either comes, it's just annoying and frustrating. With weak defenses and squads to counter it. Maps are smallish and silly. Barren land can not be terraformed to useful farmland. And there is not much usable land for farms overall. Storages are too small once you get going and build options are too few. And to actually build a functional town you have to abandon the common structure/layout you see in real life because workers are walking too slow to where they're supposed to work, wasting resources all the time. Same as in banished, where the farmer lives across town so he spends too little time on his farm because he's walking half the time from and to work, wasting his crop. So, fun game? Sure. It's ok. But after a couple of days and a few games I didn't care for it at all. Tried a few more games without enemies, just to build stuff, but then the maps are too small again...

This is one of those games that has "simple" graphics, yet can lag severely, unless you have a high end PC. The premise of the game is good. It's easy to figure out how to build a thriving city, but there isn't much motivation in the game. This game may improve significantly with updates.