I have immensely enjoyed my time with Kingdom: New Lands. The set up of randomly generated island variations makes every playthrough both exciting and scary, and the feeling of branching out and fortifying your base is very satisfying. This is not a very action-heavy game, but more a dynamic adventure with the highs of triumph and the lows of defeat all wrapped up in a beautiful simulation game. With a great challenge, subtle and organic strategy and a gorgeous presentation, Kingdom: New Lands brings an excellent title to the Switch, one you won't want to miss.
Kingdom: New Lands is the same survival simulation game you'll find on Steam, but it feels even more at home on the Nintendo Switch. While the lack of tutorial and clearly defined goals can potentially lead to frustration and some difficult first starts, Kingdom's simple controls lead you right into an incredibly engrossing game. The gorgeous pixel graphics shine on the Switch's screen, and the changing of day to night, and summer to fall is not only visually stunning, it's an ever present reminder that winter is coming. Based upon the principle that nothing lasts, with each new game Kingdom asks: How long can your crown survive?
Simple. Mobile. Challenging. At first it seems repetitive, but the more time you put into it you find yourself fine tuning your expansion strategy. With every failure and lost crown comes knowledge for future success. Definitely worth the 15 bucks.
Kingdom: New Lands is a great experience. At a first glance, it looks like a kingdom management game with a very simple gameplay premise; carefully built with an astonishing beautiful pixel art style. Under its subtle design philosophy, though, lies a deep experience that is both frustrating and fascinating.
Kingdom: New Lands may look impressive and feature a very immersive sound component but the game's limits become visible early on, when its simplicity turns more into an obstacle than an asset. The feeling of repetitiveness also becomes dominant early on, which doesn't contribute for an experience that at first seems to set the stage for something grand and ambitious.
When it hits those lows, it's not unplayable, but it's dang close. I'm more apt to put it down after a particularly choppy run, but I still find myself coming back to it after a while. Despite its technical flaws, I still want to see all of the different areas, and learn all of their secrets.
A deceptively simple idea that can become laboured and bewildering as well as oddly compelling, Kingdom: New Lands is certainly a curious take on the strategy genre. Its ambiguous, incredibly minimalistic nature will initially intrigue and could easily frustrate in equal measure. Fans of roguelikes or tower defence-style games may prefer more complexity, as the simple mechanics give you control over choices rather than actions and rely on astute observation and perseverance, rather than on skill or improvisation. There is a balance to learn and a set of rules to be discovered, but even with the admittedly gorgeous aesthetic - and progressing beyond the initial stages to where the dilemma of ambition over security ramps up - it may still not be enough of a pay off to reward your time. Definitely one to consider, albeit carefully.
This is my favorite game on the Switch. I love everything about it: the beautiful pixel art, the atmospheric soundtrack, the changing weather, seasons, and light; the original gameplay that is different from all the other games out there, and the perfect pacing and level of difficulty. This game just nailed it. This buried gem deserves much more attention so a wider audience can appreciate its greatness. I consider it a borderline masterpiece.
Essentially a tower defence game there is some satisfaction to be found from seeing your settlements grow, but the core gameplay loop (which largely involves riding back and forth until you find enough coins to spend on upgrading your settlement) quickly becomes rather repetitive.
Nice game... in general. Units are governs by simple rules, most of the time it is good, but at another time it is ruining the whole session. Lack of commands like "hide behind walls" or "hold your ground" is really annoying.
This is a rare game that I will just never complete. For every great thing about it there's a hoard of BS mechanics and a load of RNG to disrespect the players time. I'm even save scumming and I've been stuck on island 4 losing to ridiculous RNG such as bad placement and bad archer aim, and then there's the fact that on top of the rng, it's brutally and insanely difficult. The game also touts itself as a strategy game, but there are so few things you can control that any "strategy" to be had is minimal. The worst part is that playthroughs can take like 30 hours EACH doing the same thing on repeat hoping you don't get a bad seed for 5 islands in a row. Again, this would be fine if it wasn't reliant on rng and terrible ai. This review is jumbled, and off the top of my head, so bottom line:
F*** this game.
At first I found myself surprisingly addicted to this game. However, I can't get past the second level because multiple times now I've had game-breaking bugs related to builders not cutting down trees or building walls.
If not for that I would have kept going, but regardless, the game is way too simple and tedious. There's just not much to it. It's not very consistent and many things are unclear, like who is the guy that spawns at a level 4 base? Some kind of tax collector who doesn't collect taxes? Why does the trader sometimes charge me a coin and sometimes doesn't, and just how long does he have to sit in my base before he drops money, and how much longer before I can pay him to leave?
A lot of stuff is just poorly designed. Level 1 farms never produce money. You can't tell an archer to get out of a tower, even if the tower is not useful at all. Why is destroying the trader and destroying villager spawns an option? Sometimes you will have to because the randomly generated levels will generate very poorly (they often do).
The absolute worst part is the traveling. You have to be constantly traveling, which takes a long time. Your horse can run, but he has to rest for longer than the amount of time he can run (or you can stand still for 5 seconds to eat some grass as long as there are no trees within 100 miles). The game looks nice at first, but it's the same crap over and over. There will be huge stretches of screen with nothing in them at all. Your territory can be huge, but there's hardly anything to put down in it. You can make farms, walls and towers, that's it. You can pay an archer shrine to power up your archers. You run around. Just so shallow.
Even free would be too high a price for so much wasted time.
SummaryTales spread of far off isles with mysteries waiting to be discovered. Rulers will need all the strength of their subjects to sail away and find new kingdoms in these New Lands. Kingdom: New Lands builds upon the gameplay and mystery of Kingdom by introducing new content to the title while maintaining the simplicity and depth. Travel to ...