A Kingdom for Keflings is a city building game. You can play as three or four different in-game people or with your X360 avatar. There’s no difference between which character you choose; they all serve the same functions at the same speeds, they’re just different skins effectively.
It’s a chill relax game like most city builders but it’s chill is significantly higher than most since there’s no need to pay attention to money or anything in this one. There’s no fail states or anything. That makes it feel a bit easier than most others where it seems like money comes in an out and if you’re doing it wrong you can’t build more cause you’re hemorrhaging money. I don’t like that in my city builders, I like simple just existence.
Instead of money you collect resources, and they’re infinite. You don’t even have to collect them with your avatar if you don’t want to. You can simply assign a Kefling to do the job, which they will do forever without stopping. You can make them collect resources and transport them; they even go into some of the buildings to allow you to change the resource into a different type of resource, like logs into planks into carved wood or rocks into cobblestones into bricks. There’s four basic resources logs, rocks, crystals, and wool, and each one has to successive upgrades, you still always mine the basic one but you can put them into a building that changes them to the next level up and then put that new resource into another building to level it up to its last form.
The only thing you have to do is build buildings. They gather the resources and you can order things to be made like a kitchen or a bedroom or something of that nature. When it’s made, you have to pick it up and place it, there’s diagrams for different buildings and how to set the items you’ve made to create the buildings, when you’ve set the last item in place it auto builds it into a functioning building. The game is pretty basic, there’s no story. It’s just building stuff up til you’ve found the diagrams to make a castle for your kingdom.
This Kefling game is made to be played in short bursts, an hour or two here and there. That’s when it’s its most fun. Otherwise you feel like you’re waiting forever to get resources from the Keflings. I no lifed this, as I am one to do, it gets boring and shitty doing it that way cause you’re just sitting there waiting for a while until you have things set up to move quickly and that can be a pain in the ass. Play it in short settings, makes a world of difference while yeah you’re still waiting for stuff just as long it doesn’t feel as bad as waiting all in a single sitting. Once you have a good base set of resources collected and have figured out how to set up the resource collections and upgrades to get it more expedited it moves really fast and you don’t really have to wait but for a few minutes every now and then. And you can always collect and transport resources yourself too. There are also two sets of upgrades, one for you to help you carry more, walk more quickly, and obtain resources faster, Keflings also have upgrades to do the same thing. You’ll find their upgrades more quickly as most of yours come from small missions the mayor to be turned king, gives you.
Honestly, because I no lifed this, it wasn’t as enjoyable as it should have been, it took til late game for me to figure out how stupid my set up was and then it took a few hours destroy and reorganizing buildings to get it set up to do things quickly. However sadly, I was near the end of the game by the time I figured out how to set it up better. Had I had it set up that way in the first place I probably wouldn’t have required but maybe half the time I spent on the game, which really irks me. So I enjoyed the very start of the game and near the end because during the middle everything was set up so bad, which is entirely my fault, that it just became a slog. I can’t really fault the game on my own fuck ups though.
That being said this is the first of two games, A World of Keflings is the second one, and I played that forever ago, it was my introduction. I think that one is the superior game. I didn’t have things set up well in that one EVER, but it ever really felt like a slog, everything just seemed to go faster in that game than this one. Characters felt like they naturally moved faster, resources seemed to go faster or there wasn’t as many needed. They learned where players were likely to fuck up and made it harder for them to fuck up in the sequel. I like when devs do stuff like that, if a dev can make up for my incompetence to make me look good, then they’re fantastic.
A Kingdom for Keflings was developed by: Ninjabee
Point of Sale: X360
$10: You might be a giant but please don’t piss on the castle, fire or no fire. Learn from Gulliver’s actions, you’ll just piss off the queen.
A review copy was bought by the reviewer.
darkmikasonfire has awarded A Kingdom for Keflings The Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval
Indie Gamer Team 