Kingdom Two Crowns is easily one of my favorite games and keeps me coming back again and again even without updates. It’s a game where starting fresh can feel great, but progress and advancement is rewarding. It took an already engaging and memorable game, Kingdom New Lands, and developed it into a well balanced multiplayer experience. It’s three versions in one are a stellar deal and the Norse Lands DLC is so much more than a cherry on top. For fantasy, strategy, and indie fans, Kingdom Two Crowns: Norse Lands is a must.
Even though the experience is strictly two-dimensional, has no menus, and essentially no on-screen text, the deep level of strategy that cooks underneath is nothing short of mesmerizing. While at times the difficulty can seem very intense, and all seems lost, Kingdom Two Crowns is designed so you can rebuild your empire after the toughest of invasions or the coldest of winters - and all achieved by the simplest of decrees: to build, expand, and defend.
Kingdom Two Crowns in a nutshell: minimalistic 2-player kingdom development/exploration/survival game with beautiful music and graphics that will keep you hooked playing for many many hours.
In this game you can become a monarch and build a kingdom up from its ruins. The controls are very simple: you can trot/gallop with your horse left and right, and you can drop coins/gems to interact with the world. For example, turning a beggar into a peasant requires you to give him a gold coin. Cutting a tree requires allocating a gold coin on it, and so on. You can upgrade your camp and buy weapons/tools for your peasants to have jobs. You cannot control your followers, they will do as they think best to accomplish the tasks you request (via investing gold coins on stuff), and sometimes they'll be dumb and not do exactly what you want, but I guess that's just a bit of realism right there. There is no undo button (or any buttons for that matter), so you must be strategic and think carefully before you build stuff around.
Yes, the game is very similar to the previous version(s), Kingdom New Lands. But when something is working amazingly, why fix it? Same graphics, mostly same sounds, new music and objects in the world, more upgrades, a new variant (Shogun kingdom - mostly skin, but also some character roles) and a new playstyle, but above all, the most wonderful addition to the game is the capability for 2 players to rule the kingdom with a split screen! Now my wife and I don't have to take turns, we just play together and that is as awesome as anything can get.
I am impressed by how smoothly the game runs on split screen. There are slight frame rate drops when you build really large armies, just as there were in the previous version of the game, but this hasn't hindered play for us at all.
There are also a couple of bugs as I could expect from any recent release. The most notable one is the "hermit bug", where some key characters will wander off the camp when they shouldn't, or simply disappear right in front of your eyes. That can be frustrating, but we've only experienced it once, then read that others experienced it too. I'm assuming devs are aware of this and will fix this in a future update.
I'm not saying anything else as to not spoil the fun of the game. If you haven't played this game and it piques your curiosity, I'd advice you to give it a shot and not look for much information online; figuring out what things do on your own will is so much more fun than reading about it on a wiki. That's how we've been exploring the new objects in the game and we've been having a blast. I'm sure most of you would, too.
Kingdom Two Crowns brings deceptively complex strategy and empire building to the Switch, in as well a presented package as you can find. While some obtuse and unclear mechanics may turn some players off, others will no doubt welcome the challenge, and embrace this new world which they ought to conquer. Punctuated by stunning visuals, and rewarding gameplay and discovery, Kingdom Two Crowns offers some of the finest strategy gameplay available on the Switch.
Kingdom Two Crowns feels more like an extensive update than a new entry to the series, but the base game is still so immensely enjoyable that it doesn’t really matter. This is the perfect starting point for new players, and those who are returning might still be surprised by some of the secrets to be found.
Kingdom Two Crowns offers a hell of a view, but you may find its brand of light strategy too sedate if you’re not one to ‘smell the roses’. Give it a chance, though, and it really grows on you. Disappointing framerate aside, it’s a great introduction to the series, and valuable split-screen co-op adds a fresh, more relaxing dimension to its tower defence. If you bounced off New Lands, this won’t win you over, but if the last game piqued your interest but passed you by, Two Crowns is a much easier recommendation.
Kingdom Two Crowns is the best game I’ve ever played in over 30 years. A genuine masterpiece of design, animation, and sound. Beating the Greed for the first time was the most memorable video game moment I’ve experienced. I love the music in this game. It’s easy to enter a zen-like meditative state while playing. So beautiful and engaging. I love the simple controls yet deep gameplay. The screen is completely uncluttered. I wish there were more games like this.
Cudownie minimalistyczna pikseloza - z początku interesująca, lecz po kilku godzinach nie mająca już zupełnie nic do zaoferowania :(. Na xone problemy z optymalizacją gdy za dużo się dzieje.
It's not an awful game, but honestly it just isn't very fun. The pace is infuriatingly slow (it takes forever just for you to move around) and you spend the majority of your time just waiting for money to come in so you can actually do something. Or you wait forever for things to build. It's like Clash of Clans or something.
Many elements of the game are extremely frustrating. For example, once you build a guard tower or a ship, your archers are stuck inside that for the rest of the game, so too bad if you need them to defend your borders from enemy attacks later. The game also does next to nothing to explain to you what everything does. Some things are self-explanatory or can be inferred, but not everything. I spent a gem to unlock this hermit girl who was immediately attacked and kidnapped. Would've been good if the game could let me know spending that gem would release a kidnappable human BEFORE I wasted it. Learning the hard way is great IRL but this is a GAME, isn't it supposed to be fun? The pace gets even slower as you get close to conquering an island as people seem to stop spawning entirely, making it impossible to continue doing anything, especially if you have died and respawned with few workers already, basically breaking your game. (Unless I've missed something, once you expand past the spawn points for recruits, you can't get any more so if you have no builders at that point you can never build again.) It's a catch 22 because you need to expand out to win, but expanding out eliminates the resources you need to be able to win.
Incredibly frustrating that this game feels so broken in its mechanics and there are so many ways you can get yourself in a situation where it's impossible to progress, or you spend 90% of your time waiting around for something to happen.
Graphics are also quite lacking in my opinion. I grow very weary of this modern fad for everything to look like a SNES game. It's 2018 for goodness sake, can't developers make games that actually look nice?
Finally, it's still early days for this game, but there are few bugs and glitches so even if you're interested might be worth waiting until the patch comes out in early 2019.
I got **** into buying this by all the extremely positive reviews here on Metacritic so I guess this review is a counterpoint to that. I'm sure it's great for some people but if you don't like slow-paced, frustrating strategy games that feel like mobile base-building games but with worse graphics, don't buy this. I feel like it has the potential to be something awesome (the fundamental concepts of resource management, defense and expansion, and simplicity of it are great) but somehow it just does't actually work together into a satisfying experience due to how easy it is for your progress to be blocked.
SummaryIn Kingdom Two Crowns, players must work in the brand-new solo or co-op campaign mode to build their kingdom and secure it from the threat of the Greed. Experience new technology, units, enemies, mounts, and secrets in the next evolution of the award-winning micro strategy franchise.