Kingdoms and Castles Review

Relax and chill while you grow your small village into a town, a city, and end up with a kingdom. Today we’re going to look at a medieval city building game called Kingdoms and Castles developed by a small independent game studio called Lion Shield Studios. This is the game that I’ve been wish-listed on Steam since it was released. A couple of months ago when the event of Steam Summer Sale is ongoing, I bought it.

Since there’s not much to talk about in the story Let’s jump to the gameplay section. You start searching for the best island with plenty of resources that you can find. When you find the perfect island, you start building a small castle, close enough to common resources such as fertile soil, wood, and stone. The small castle will spawn five peasants that will help you build an early game building like a road, hovel, and farm. It can also help you to gather resources.

In the mid-game, you need to upgrade your farm and housing space. There’s a lot of building that you can build to make yourself easy like a forester that replants trees, a windmill that increases the production of wheat, baker, swineherd, and others. Resources like iron and charcoal are also important for your kingdom in the future. You’ll also be going to start building a treasurer room where you tax peasants so you can trade with other kingdoms.

Eventually, you will encounter a Viking or a dragon that will destroy your kingdom. Defense like a wall is important for the Viking since the Viking cannot breach through. For the dragon, it is just a race of who kills who. It was not easy for the first dragon or Viking encounter, but you’ll learn that you need something to fight back and build an archer tower or ballista tower. I'm not a fan of the archer and soldier squad since it slow and has low damage.

When you reach 1000 peasants, the game will just be getting harder and harder with more Viking invasion and dragon encounters. At this point you know how the whole game mechanic works so you will also expand more to all sides of the island and build more defenses. Don’t forget to gather more resources and farm fishes and fruit. In the end game, the challenging part is to make the kingdom beautiful but effective at the same time.

The blocky 3D style is not quite fit for the game, but the developer serves it matched enough with the theme of the game. Peasants with a minimalistic style that only uses two cube models are very cute. The bright color also matches into a happy medieval story that you heard when you’re a kid. The only annoying thing is the cloud that is always covers your kingdom where you zoom out to see your whole island.

The music in this game is relaxing. You can feel the medieval theme through the game where you in a relaxing phase or in a battle with a dragon or a Viking. The sound that is created from the building can be heard when you let the camera get close enough to the building. Each building creates different sounds depends on what the building is for. Overall, the sound in this game is pretty relaxing and you might fall asleep listening to this.

I review this game while I have eight hours of playing time and achieve 1000 peasants. I’m not proud to review this game while not fully experiencing the end game where you need to achieve 5000 peasants, but I need to put review something in a span of 2 weeks. I’ll eventually play it to reach 5000 peasants whatsoever in the future, but before that, I need to pump up the difficulty, since I review this on normal difficulty.