Since it launched earlier this year, the Nintendo Switch has seen a pretty wide range of genres make their home on the system. Fighting games, shooters, racers, platformers and action titles are certainly all bringing some of their best examples to the Switch, but we’ve yet to see a notable showing from games that require a more measured pace.
Strategy games have also had their day on the Switch, with games like Disgaea 5, Mario+Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, and Wargroove getting a fairly warm reception. With Kingdom: New Lands, developers Noio and Licorice (and publisher Raw Fury) has taken a different approach than the somewhat complex, detail oriented management required by others in the genre.
While still a strategy game at it’s core, Kingdom relies on simple resource management and a minimalistic presentation to craft something different. With a beautiful take on pixel-art style and a subtle, organic approach to worldbuilding, this side-scrolling empire builder will draw you in quick and keep you coming back again and again.
Build
Starting up Kingdom: New Lands gives you a first glimpse at the game’s overarching philosophy. There’s no start menu, no gauntlet of options or configurations. One loading screen introduces the development studios and lets you cycle through palette-swapped kings and queens, and then you’re in.
The ghostly specter of a dead king advises you that his kingdom failed, and that it falls to you to build something new in the land you’ve found. The subtlety of the game’s roguelike features becomes apparent here if you should fail; you may see something of your self in the ghost that appears the second time, as the memory of your own fallen empire comes back to you.
A few short instructions teach you how to built your camp, recruit vassals and arm them with bows and hammers. Coins are your only resource here, and these can be gathered from various sources, like traders your bowmen’s hunting travels.
Managing resources is key here as you choose between the three simple directives the ghost provides: build, expand, defend. Your kingdom is raided nightly by haunting creatures with one goal: to take your crown. Defending against the increasing hordes of monsters requires sturdy walls and strong archers, all of which require precious gold to build. This is balanced against the need for workers and the final goal of building a ship to ferry you to (sorry about this)…new lands.
It’s an elegant loop, if a little long. Early in the game, enemies will only ever attack from one end of the (astonishingly long) map, meaning you can focus defenses to one end while building out resources to the other. It can be tricky though; as defenses go down they’ll cost to rebuild, and your money supply isn’t always consistent from day to day. Overspending early can leave you destitute as the enemy grows stronger.
The game features a seasonal cycle, meaning that some resources that are available in one season may not be later. Winter, for instance, is a lousy time for crops, which are one of the best renewing sources of gold in the game. This can sometimes leave you on the outs if you splurge before the snow falls and find yourself scrounging, especially since this is around the time the enemy is getting strongest.
The game does promote exploration as well, and there’s a lot to find outside the walls of your castle: chests full of gold, new followers, and even upgrades for your builders and archers are waiting in the wilds. The maps can feel a bit long, though, especially when the random generator spawns your precious broken ship far, far away from your core camp. Traveling can be a chore, and you’ll sometimes end up hard-pressed to navigate your kingdom in any efficient manner. Build points for farms and defenses are random, too, meaning strategically placing towers and walls is a dice-roll at best.
Overall, the core mechanics are simple yet satisfying. A bit more control over building points would be nice, though, as would the ability to swap your subjects’ roles (even for a fee.) It’s all to easy to sink a significant amount of time into building only to realize that you spent poorly on a few structures early on, basically forcing you to either restart or hope to outlast the horde with an empty purse.
Still, the stakes of mismanagement bring an exhilirating tension to an otherwise calm world. Watching fervently as monsters tear at your walls, waiting for the sun to drive them away is a key part of the experience. Each lost crown comes with a lesson, and while it can take a few tries to get the gist, it becomes all the more engrossing once you understand how to spend and when to save.
Explore
Simply put, all of Kingdom’s simple mechanics could easily make for a very lukewarm game, if mishandled. Luckily, presentation may be where the game shines brightest, even though it’s art style hails from the very dawn of video games.
8-bit style blends seamlessly with modern systems like dynamic lighting and reflections to breathe a stunning amount of life into the world around you. The skybox shifts as you travel, giving a sense of breadth beyond the flat ribbon you can access. Forests feel dark and foreboding, and shifting seasons add more permanence to the key day/night cycles that track the passage of time.
You have absolutely no control over where your followers go and what they do, beyond giving your workers structures to build or farms to tend. NPCs mill about when not working, and bowmen range far and wide hunting animals for coin. Beyond your walls, rabbits frolic and deer respond reflexively to your approach, as free men grasp wander hopelessly, begging for coin and purpose.
All of this organic motion ties together beautifully to make the world vibrant and immersive. It’s a subtle thing, at first, something that is easy to overlook as you fret over where to spend your precious cash in hopes of surviving another night. However, as time goes by you may suddenly realize just how much you care for these random pieces on the board. When my defenses fell and my workers lost their tools, I felt…responsible. Like I’d failed them. I wasn’t just losing the game; I had brought these people here but I could not keep them safe.
Noio and Licorice have done a stunning job here by letting the world truly inform your play. The choices you make don’t just affect your ability to complete your objective; they determine the fate of the people holding your kingdom together.
Expand
Minimalist design and simple, focused mechanics are certainly used to great effects here. Kingdom: New Lands is most definitely the result of a development team that understands this aesthetic to its core. Still, without progressive rewards and a sense of progress, even the most elegant stark game can get dull.
If anything, this is where Kingdom struggles a bit, though not nearly enough to seal its fate. There’s most certainly a sense of progression throughout the game. Building a single kingdom to its seafaring stage results in an expanded map, with a new kingdom to explore and develop. You’re given more resources each time, and the landscape changes as you progress as well, lending continuity and a reason to start from scratch every time.
You’ll also find new mounts hidden throughout the game, a great (if utterly hidden) incentive not to cower in your castle, building walls and praying for daylight. Still, beyond these small aesthetic bonuses there’s not much to find that you can hope to hold on to after you set sail.
There are small “quality of life” features that would certainly be welcome in a game like this. I found myself wishing for some sort of tracking tool, with stats on how long I’ve lasted and how much gold was spent in each level. In a game so focused on resource management, there’s a noticeable lack of data to help you learn; everything is contextual, for better or worse.
Conclusion
While there’s no shortage of strategy games available for the Switch, we’ve certainly not seen anything quite like Kingdom: New Lands on the platform. It fits well as both a short sprint while traveling and a “settle in” experience at home. While the game has seen great success on PC and other consoles, it’s never been tested like this, and I’m happy to say it excels as a portable experience.
There’s certainly some tweaks that could put Kingdom: New Lands over the top. The recently announced multiplayer coming in 2018’s follow up Kingdom: Two Crowns could definitely benefit from more flexible resources and enhanced stats. Still, it’s hard to undercut the fact that New Lands offers incredible immersion and wholly accessible play with such a small footprint to show for it.
If you’ve hungry for strategy gameplay and and a break from the action-packed chaos that most of the Switch eShop has on offer, Kingdom: New Lands will almost certainly prove a great investment of both your gold, and your time.
Review Copy Provided by Rawfury Games
