Kingdoms and Castles is an indie city builder, released on Steam, 20th July 2017 at £6.99 / $9.99. It is developed and published by Lion Shield, LLC – a small indie game developer consisting of Peter Angstadt and Michael Peddicord.
This is a fairly simple but effective and well thought out city builder with combat.
Kingdoms and Castles allows you to create a city using colourful voxel pieces, make an efficient working supply chain, ensure your citizens are happy, command a small army and defeat rampaging vikings and creatures. There is a fairly small and limited set of buildings so I found it fairly easy to get my supply up and running efficiently, but then a plague wiped out half my citizens in one year. Damn, should have built that hospital sooner. You have to contend with winter, fires, disease and rampaging enemies.
Bands of Vikings will periodically raid and terrorize your city, whilst a dragon flies overhead and targets buildings to burn to a crisp. I even had an ogre destroy an entire section of wall, which I thought was quite rude. The Vikings will go around walls, so you can build your city to kite them through archer towers and ballista, ensuring that they’re dead before they reach your population. Don’t leave the centre undefended though – because of course, a dragon can simply fly over your fortifications!
You can build an army and you can control them (well, you can control a general and his recruits will follow), so there is an extra level of action to the game there.
Pros:
- Attractive voxel graphics
- Simple, but fun gameplay
- Static defenses such as archer towers and ballista
- Commandable units through an army
- Extra strategy required from both land and air units attacking.
- 3 difficulties, with easy having no attacks – so a relaxing city builder, or a more taxing RTS.
- Planned updates already listed so looks like it will only improve in the future.
Cons:
- Very small maps with odd shapes, a world editor or larger maps would be good.
- Most maps feel very similar (developer has said adding random “unique” things is on the table for an update though!)
- Eventually you will hit the limit for what you can do on a map. It certainly has replayability – but it’s not endless.
- Very experienced city builders may find the game a little too simple.
For me, sometimes it’s nice to play a city builder that is engaging but not too complicated. I’m really looking forward to the future updates!
