Kingdoms and Castles

To keep things short - my main issue with Kingdoms and Castles is the limited gameplay. The graphics aren't my cup of tea, but even I would not deny that the presentation is excellent within its scope of approach. In the end, however, there simply are not that many options within the game itself. For example, there are only so many buildings, and while initially it may seem a lot, the resource-production chains are very simple. Take, for instance, food production - the most important, and extensive, of the chains. For the producers, you have either Farms or Orchards. Farms can be "augmented" by nearby Windmills, and the food from them can be further processed by a Baker, while Orchards simply put food in the Granary (you have a choice of either Small Granary or larger size regular Granary)... and that's it. There is an additional building that deals with Food (or its distribution), namely the Market, but that's the most complex chain the game features. There is a total of 38 buildings, and do note that quite a few of those are either repeats, or something that will see limited use (you will place one or two of). The gameplay balance feels... random. It does not take much for your town to hit a death-spiral that you probably will not recover from. After over 20 hours, I am still trying to figure out a way to defend on Sommern (easy difficulty) against early Dragon attacks with the resources I (do not) posses. Ultimately, this may appeal to somebody looking for a very casual and simple game to mostly look at while chilling, but for somebody who spent hundreds of hours on gems such as the Anno series Kingdoms and Castles is just much too simple. That aside, the game itself runs flawlessly, the music is quite pleasant, and the graphics are presumably eye-pleasing to people more used to heavily voxelized presentation.

The size of the Islands are very small. Attackers are looking like Orks & Ogers. No idea why they are called Vikings. At the moment the game gets boring after 2-3 games, because it hasn't enough content.

The game loop is nice, you are always building to the next thing and trying to please your town. However the game is not very deep. Once you get in to the higher tier stuff and build decent defenses you quickly run out of things to do. The game is nice and comfy for a weekend, but be warned it does not have enough content to last more than a day or so. Its a casual city builder and i enjoyed the 12 hours i put in.

Most city builders feel like high-detail simulations to me. They often go, for my tastes, too far to maintain the fun factor. I feel like I'm having to micro-manage too much about the game world and I always want something that's a bit more casual. But I don't want to go all the way into idle game or clicker territory in saying that, and that middle ground seems to be hard to find. Kingdoms and Castles is a great game to chill out while playing, and you can have several minutes to leave the game running in the background while things build up (if you set them up right) before coming back to check when the alarm warns you of an incoming dragon or viking raid. The gameplay is hands-on enough that it doesn't feel like you can just walk away for an hour and it'll do everything for you, but it doesn't feel like you have to pause every second to issues orders to a dozen groups of people in different parts of the city to make sure everyone's doing the exact right thing in the moment. It isn't so simple that it loses all depth, but it introduces each new layer of game mechanics with a gentle progression curve that feels very easy to just add one more thing to the pile. By the endgame you're juggling a dozen methods of managing military power, a magical neighbour, food production, hygeine and health, and a few other factors, but the way you get there is smooth enough that it never feels like you're worrying about more than one or two simple tasks at a time.

Where to start is the question. Easy to play... but no balance to anything. I like the concept but the implementation is meh levels of effort. This game could become so much better but this just feels like it will never get there.