The music is atmospheric and so is the art. There are minimal instructions and it's up to you to figure out the right choices to make when it comes to building your kingdom, and it's up to you to notice the intricacies of the world. You will die and die again and again until you figure out the best method of approach. It is a game you can beat in 2 hours if you really play your cards right, or take a month to spread out your playtime. The money system is interesting in how it's an actual physical object, and you can not horde money as it will overflow after a certain point. A great game that I think more people should play.

"Simple In Concept, Boring In Practice"

Kingdom: Classic is a simple kingdom management that has very little to its gameplay. The main loop is using gold to recruit citizens, and these people can become archers/knights, farmers, or builders. By building defense towers and gates, along with a few farms, you slowly (and I mean SLOWLY) build up a society. However, there are legions of goblins that attack certain nights, and your defenses must be able to withstand them, otherwise your kingdom falls in shambles. Its a simple loop really, but it gets extremely repetitive really fast.

The only actions you can do are spend gold and move around. That's it. The systems behind this aren't much deeper - fund enough to build structure/build tool, and recruit people to perform these tasks. You as a player do nothing else. By the 15th day I thought I was going to beat this game, until I realized I had multiple goblin portals to destroy and structures to build in order to expand my kingdom. I could not fathom playing this game for any longer than I already had, as the gameplay is just dry and goes nowhere over the course of the game.

Yes, the pixel art is nice. Yes, the soundtrack can be pretty (if not repetitive) at times. However, this is a video game, and with a gameplay loop this basic and bland, it almost felt like I wasn't playing at times. It never felt engaging, and it didn't even feel like the best way I could WASTE my time after a certain point. Its serviceable for an hour at best, but further playtime proved that the game is as shallow as a puddle.

I do think the AI is dumb as well. I witnessed multiple occasions where my citizens would lazily walk back to camp as night bestowed upon them, only for them to be slaughtered by the incoming horde of goblins. Why they don't run, I don't know. Furthermore, adding a limit to how much gold you can carry, on top of the fact that you have to MANUALLY go around and collect tithes, is just plain un-fun. This wasted so much time in "adding" to the gameplay loop, all because the developers could not add anything else to their title.

Overall, this game isn't worth it. While the art is nice and the soundtrack is okay, it isn't worth paying money for a basic and bland gameplay loop that doesn't become anything greater than pressing a button to throw a gold coin. I would Not Recommend this game, plain and simple. There are plenty of more in-depth, stylistic, unique, and rewarding strategy games out there, some of which that don't resort to shallow and lazy systems.

Final Verdict: 3/10 (Poor)

A nice game to play on a rainy day. It's technically a rouge-like, but the only randomization that takes place is in the layout of the very small world map, and from what I've seen it doesn't really make too much of a difference. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, the game is pretty simple and easy to pick up, with great aesthetics and satisfying, condensed controls.
It's pretty fun for the first couple of runs while the game's still fresh, but after a while the lack of content and variety starts to show. There's not much variation for how each individual run pans out and each run starts to feel formulaic. This would be fine if the runs weren't as long as they are. When you're not making interesting and different decisions each run, they start to become a slog.
Overall this is not a bad game at all, it's got plenty of things going for it such as its visuals and great beginning time. If you pick it up and jive with the concept, I'd consider buying one of the paid sequels to this, they're much more refined substantive compared to this game.

Without fanfare, Kingdom is a minimalist estate management simulator; nothing is really explicit about the identity of our lord, nor the world in which he evolves. This is undoubtedly the strength of the title, which plays the mystery card, benefiting from a careful artistic direction, both in the sprites and in the atmospheric chiptune. In the same way, the progression is done quite subtly: if all the tools and the map are given to the player, the learning process is done little by little. It appears that you have to maintain a subtle balance between the different professions, before militarising your domain to destroy the different portals. Accounting is not trivial; our purse offers only relative indications and it is often necessary to make long trips to consider the state of each side of the kingdom. Kingdom leaves it to the player to discover the basics for themselves. Lessons are sometimes learned the hard way, and starting a new game means starting the same routine again. Thus, halfway between a relaxing experience and tight micro-management, the title struggles to really impose a pace in the discovery of the mechanics, while avoiding too heavy a repetition. The experience, however, is not unpleasant.

Logo de cara a pixel art desse jogo se destaca, principalmente nos reflexos da água, que dá um visual bacana pro jogo. Em suma, tudo é muito lindo, apesar de ser simples.

A gameplay se resume em andar por aí com seu cavalo, ganhando moedas pra investir em profissões, se proteger à noite de trolls e outros inimigos, evoluir sua base pra ter muros mais resistentes e liberar mais profissões até você conseguir destruir os portais e zerar o jogo.

Alguns problemas ficam evidentes quando você joga, é normal visto que é o primeiro da série Kingdom. Mas vale a pena listar:

- É impossível cancelar uma ação no jogo. Se você sem querer colocou suas moedas para construir uma torre, por exemplo, já era. A torre vai ficar lá e você vai perder arqueiros à medida que você expande seu
reino.

- A IA dos arqueiros não é muito boa. Já aconteceu de eu estar sendo atacado de um lado, então desesperadamente tento contratar mais arqueiros e eles irem pro lado oposto, o que está tranquilo.

- Baixa variedade. Novamente, é o primeiro da série. É normal ter poucas variações, mas mesmo assim, poderia ter mais profissões, inimigos, construções, etc etc.

No geral é um game muito legal e viciante, é prazeroso explora-lo também. Mas quando você zera e parte pra pegar as conquistas, torna-se muito tedioso e monótono os dias passando. Já me peguei jogando esse jogo e vendo algum vídeo no youtube ou ouvindo músicas.

Recomendo que jogue este pra saber como funciona a mecânica base dos sucessores ou só pra passar o tempo mesmo.

Review escrita em 2020.

At its core, Kingdom has a fantastic recipe for a game.
It's simple, it's addictive and it's fun, while also having moments of relaxing and laid back strategic gameplay of building your defensive walls and expanding your kingdom to survive from an enslaught of monsters that attack during the night.

The problem is, this game suffers from an exceptional lack of quality of life improvements that add up and you notice as you play and over time, it turns from being seemingly minor nuisances to actual fundamental problems that hamper the player's enjoyment of the game.

A few of these problems include really bad AI or bugs that can be the difference whether you survive to the next day or not. Sometimes the builders won't react to construction set out/walls to build and a lot of these npcs have a TERRIBLE slow walk that slows down their travel around your settlement. At times, they hang around outside of the walls for absolutely no reason and monsters kill them, because they haven't returned to camp fast enough.

And then you lose your hard-earned money and you have to spend even more to get back your workers and archers.
The gain/loss ratio in this game seems so unfair at times.
If monsters break down your walls and kill your archers and builders, and you have very little or none of them left, you might as well stop playing right there and then because you will only lose even more from this and most likely, you just backed yourself into an inevitable game over.

One thing Kingdom would benefit majorly from is assigning specific structures to workers manually, and perhaps a recall button to get npcs inside walls whenever you need them; losing your workers/archers becomes very costly in the long run and there's nothing you can do about it.

Overall I enjoyed Kingdom as a game - the pixelated artstyle is gorgeous, the music is minimalistic and soothing and like I said, the gameplay has so much potential to be both simple and strategic; you only have 3 controls - move left, move right and drop coins to buy something.
But its inherent flaws make it frustrating to play at times and players having to start from scratch every time after a game over, even if it's the fault of the AI, brings the game down.

I first tried it on Epic Games when they gave it away, played it for a good few hours and then found out it's on Steam, I'll keep playing it from time to time but it's worth knowing the shortcomings this game has before picking it up, so you won't be too disappointed.