I'll start off by saying that it is extremely addicting and worth the money.

The game begins by giving you a 30 second tutorial then literally thrusting you into the game, expecting you to use trial and error to succeed. As you play the game you will get more efficient each play through as you learn more about how the game works and what strategies are good in the early mid and late game.

Pros:
+ Sound Track is on Point
+ Visual Style is appealing
+ Proggression is strong
+ Extremely Difficult, forcing you to adapt
+ Money is your health and you can't hold an infinite amount of money

Cons:
- Lack of story
- Horse Stamina (When your kingdom gets massive it's extremely annoying to stop and recover stamina)
- Lack of Late game monsters (There are essentially 3 monster types)

Questionable Design Decisions:
= Extremely Fast Day and NIght Cycles
= Only One Wave of monsters per Night. Becomes kind of exploitable
= Limited to building 4 knights (2 per side) Allowing more knights could have enabled more difficult attacks from the
monsters and more preperations by the player.

= The only way to get new people to your Kingdom is to hire them at camps. The system limits expansion speed but causes the player to constantly run back and forth accross the map to recruit new people.

OVERVIEW:
Simplistic game that is worth the money.

One word of advice. Don't stand too close to your catapults.

*EDIT*
TL/DR
Worker AI and Archer Accuracy is intentional and well balanced (In my opinion)
Read About what I have to say about it below

A lot of people with negative reviews are complaining about bad AI of workers and bad aim of archers. I'm not sure what the devs planned for the game but I see the "bad" AI as intentional. Basically if you give a worker or workers a job they will mindlessly try to complete the job. People complain that this is stupid because workers will go out in the middle of the night to their deaths until the project is complete. I see this as a positive thing. Say you desperately need to repair a torn down wall right as the day turns to night. Would you rather your workers stand in the safety of your kingdom or go and repair the wall as you told them to. If you plan out the jobs you give to your workers you shouldn't have a problem with all your workers going out at night to their doom to chop down a tree.

Wow that was a lot of stuff. But I'm not done yet.

On to the topic of Archers and their terrible aim.
I think Archers are meant to be inaccurate so that when they hunt during the day they don't bring in so much gold as to break the early game. A lone Archer is not very powerful, but as you recruit more people, the relentless volleys of arrows released by 15+ archers is hard to beat. Sure one archer can miss an enemy 5 times in a row but 10 archers will easily dispatch exponentially more enemies then a small group can. What I'm trying to say is that the game is balanced around recruiting. Expanding and not destroying ecampments so that you can recruit constantly. The more archers you have the more powerful your kingdom is. Rapid and early Recruitment is better than expansion because people are power. There is a good saying in Kingdom. "If your not recruiting your losing"

I just want to say that by no means is this game perfect but I just think it is necessary to call attention to down votes based on things that aren't really negatives. But after all the beauty of the review system is people can post their opinions and no one is right or wrong.

So, after over 40 hours spent playing the game I felt it's time to finally write a review.

First of all, I really enjoy this game tremendously, but I'd say it's not for everyone. If you read other reviews, you probably have a good idea what the good part of the game is, nice art, awesome soundtrack (first time I ever bought a game OST, and not regretting it one bit). These are the two things I think everyone can agree about.

Then it gets more tricky. The gameplay isn't for everyone. It's literally discover everything for yourself. including how your own guys behave, even how your own horse behaves.
The real problem can come from when you don't figure some things out (like how to keep your horse running or how to make your dudes not suicide themselves constantly) and then give up thinking the devs didn't think of that and write review claiming the game is unfinished or lacking.

On the other hand, simply reading a guide after 5 hours of play, is basically ruining the discovery experience, so in my opinion if you want to enjoy the game try to not look up too many things (or maybe just ask a simple singe question in the forums instead).

Now, that being said, another big deterrent can be the lack of endgame content. (It needs to be said though, that the devs are working on adding more stuff (for free), so that might not be true anyore in a few months.)
For me, it took me over 10 hours to beat the game the first time I think, and after that, there where achievements for doing it quick and for enduring long. The speedrunning aspect I really liked, but the endurance aspect (trying to survive as long as you can) is really lacking atm. Once you're set up there's not much to do for 30-50 days, cause you're defenses are just that good.
So if you really enjoy building up a large empire and surviving a long time, this game is in it's current stage definitely not for you (imo).
Me personally, I really enjoy the speedrunning aspect of the game, so trying over and over to finish the game quicker and quicker is really fun for me and is mostly what kept me going for the last 25 hours or so. (Especially since people keep getting quicker and quicker :D)
It also means that one has to learn more and more details about the game mechanics, which I really like too. I've played over 40 hours and still learn new stuff.

But even without doing speedruns, I think the game offers enough content to be worth the money, unless you basically spoiler yourself with guides before you even start (at which point it's getting a bit boring and mechanical, as the normal playthrough isn't that dificult once you understand most mechanics).
A big fun aspect of the game is losing horribly a lot and then learning more and more how stuff works and then at some point you just easily beat it using all your hard gained knowledge and it feels really good. But if you just look up everything, that sense of achievement will never happen and the game will probably feel a bit bland.

Two last negative points I want to mention, one is a bug the other a framerate problem. There is still a bug that can break the game a little. Like it can happen that you win, but you don't get the victory and all your dudes stop working. If you don't know that this is a bug it can get quite frustrating. The first time I actually beat the game this happened and I didn't realize it was not supposed to happen, so I spent another 20 days trying to figure out how to win until someone in the forums exaplined to me that this is a bug. (If that happens to you, just exit and start again, and it should put you before the bug happens and you should be fine from there on).
The framerate issues "luckily" only happen later on (say day 60 and upwards and usually only during blood moon nights where a lot of monsters appear), so if there wasn't an achievement for surviving 100 days most people would probably never experience it. But there is. And they do. Regardless of how good your computer rig is it seems.

I want to end with saying I had a quite magical time with this game. I bought it right when it came out and a lot of people were streaming it at that point. Since there weren't any guides available at this time it created a very unqie atmosphere, where I would hop from stream to stream watching a bit, seeing what others might have figured out that I haven't, sharing some small tips here and there myself. It really reminded me of the earlier days of gaming, when you couldn't just look up everything online but went to friends places shared and small discoveries with each others. That's something I haven't experienced in over a decade and I probably won't in quite a while. So I just want to end by shouting a big "thank you" to the devs for creating this marvelous experience with their game and I stay curious to see where they take it from here.

TL;DR : If you enjoy being a scientist, testing stuff, doing things to see what happens, learn from that, be willing to accept to fail a few times until you get it right, enjoy atmospheric pixel art and great soundtrack the this game might really be for you.
If you want to expand and grow an empire and survive a long time, don't enjoy to figure stuff and gameplay mechanics out for yourself, then you might give this game a pass (at least for now). There is more content coming, so maybe come back in 6 months and see how the game has developed by reading the latest news and content updates and see what people have to say then.

Anyway, hope this review helped give a good voerview about the good and bad aspects of the game. Please thumbs up if you find it helpful as well, so others can benefit from the reivew too :)

10 p.m.: What do we have here? Free stuff in Steam? Great! But it's probably just another 'steam library filler' - Indie, pixel graphics, I doubt I will ever play it.
11 p.m.: Reviews are quite positive and so few megabytes to download. Alright. Just to make sure...
...
...
...
2 a.m. [2nd attempt]: Stupid peasant! How can you be so f*ckin slow!!! Can't you see night is coming? Don't walk! Run!
Oh, ♥♥♥♥♥♥**d trader, what the heck have you brought me? Scythes? I don't need more farmers, you lunatic! You've spent 4 recruits for nothing!
Sh*t, sir knight, why don't you cover archers after destroying the portal? C'mon, eat some coins, cowardly run back and prepare for enemy counterattack.
Oh my God... I am stuck, and there are too many of them...
4 a.m. [3rd attempt]: Hahaha! I've recruited so many archers that you can't do anything, b*tch! Yeah, I got it, I did it.

Next day: morning - surviving at work from lack of sleep, evening - buying 'Kingdom: New Lands'.
Well, just like when I was young.

My playtime: 22.3h (based on Steam, 100% achievement)
Grindy Achievement(s): Yes (5+ achievements that might take 3h+ to finish).
Optional Achievement(s): Yes (~32 achievements).
Difficult Achievement(s): No.

A king or queen was tasked to create a new kingdom in an empty land. Roaming around with their trusty steed, people are recruited, armed with tools and weapons, and fought monsters known as Greeds who are trying to steal the crown every night. Kingdom: Classic lets you experience the whole process in a side-scroller colony sim game where you have to survive enemy attacks every night and eliminate incoming threats to win.

Pros:
- Freedom in doing whatever you want
- Simple gameplay once you know what to do

Cons:
- Tutorial doesn't cover everything that you need to know
- You can only save if you quit the game

Yes.
If you like colony sim or resource management game and don't mind retrying the game several times to understand how the game works, buy this game. Although it has a permadeath feature, it works well due to its short and simple gameplay. People who understand how the game works will enjoy the game better than the ones who are not.

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The game uses pixelated graphics in a side-scroller view. Instead of presenting us with plain backgrounds and a character that is simply walking on the land, the game provides a body of water below the land that shows the reflection of anything above it. The reflection isn't static either - it will change whenever anyone or anything moves.

Although some spots don't have anything except the plain sky background, some areas will be darker whenever there are a lot of trees involved. The area will be much brighter after more trees being cut, removing some parts in the background. Grasses that are used for your archers to hunt will also grow in empty lands, providing more background in some areas.

Weather and day systems are also implemented in the game. Although the latter one is one of the core mechanics of the game, the first one is mostly there for the aesthetic. Sometimes, the weather will be cloudy, making it hard to see the sun to keep track of the current time. It's amazing to see how a lot of details are put in a simple game like this.

Gameplay
The game will start in the daytime, giving you an option to follow a tutorial or skip it to save time. Tutorials are pretty clear in explaining basic mechanics such as recruiting vagrants, arming recruits with tools and weapons, building a wall to help you from night attacks, and sprinting with your steed. However, the tutorial doesn't cover much from there. You must figure out the rest of the mechanics yourself, which are a lot more than you imagined.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2271838372

Most of my playtime was spent figuring out how the game works. I didn't know I had to start the game over from the beginning if I lost my crown. Objectives aren't clear enough and I ended up roaming around every time to recruit vagrants since I didn't know anything else I was supposed to do. Every run is different - most placements in the map will be randomized each run and you must explore the map again to figure out where everything is located.

At some point, you might want to expand your territory. This can be done by building a wall further from the base, requiring you to cut trees that are spread almost everywhere on the map in the process. However, you might end up in a decision between cutting the trees near vagrant camps, making them disappear completely, or skip it and try to find another tree that you can cut, which might be impossible since some trees can't be cut unless if you cut the previously mentioned trees first.

Enemies
Enemies will attack your base at night, changing the game into some sort of a tower defense game with you as the base. If your defenses aren't good enough, you will be attacked, making you lose coins if you have any. If you don't, say goodbye to your crown, since if you're not fast enough to reclaim it back, you will lose the game and have to start over from the beginning.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2271838348

The game never stated it, but you must destroy all portals to win the game. Four portals are evenly placed on each side and enemies will also come out from it, even in the daytime, if you are close to it. You should be careful with them since they also can steal your crown in this state.

Although it might be confusing at first, attacking portals are simple. You need to prepare a knight, which is the only class that can do the attacking, and order the attack from your furthest wall on the side that you want to attack. This wasn't clear enough in the game and I had to spend hours just to learn how to do it properly - I even thought that I need to build walls close to the portal just to attack.

Once the knight succeeds with their attacks, a counterattack will be initiated. Enemies' counterattacks will be stronger whenever you destroy a portal and surviving the attacks is essential if you want to win. The game doesn't give you some sort of accomplishment when you win though; you'll be presented with the same screen that you got when you die with a slightly altered text.

Length and Difficulty
The game isn't that hard once you get the gist of it. However, you need to be ready to deal with the frustration and vagueness of almost everything in the game. Strangely, the game thinks that you already understand how the game works from the basic tutorial that was provided when you start the game.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2271840767

It took me hours until I understand how the game works. This happened when I tried to get the "Survive for 100 days" achievement, which took ~16.6h to finish, including the crash that I got when I had to start over 40+ days of progress.

The actual playtime depends on how fast you can destroy the portal. For instance, I finished the game in 25 days to get a certain achievement in ~4h. There is nothing that the game has to offer afterward unless if you're into achievement hunting; there are a lot of optional achievements that require you to do a certain action to finish.

Problems
The game has FPS drop once you spend more nights in the game, especially if you aim for the "Survive for 100 days" achievement. It seems that the game doesn't remove projectiles and unclaimed coins efficiently since the game runs better after you restart the game. However, the game becomes terribly slow by day 95, to the point that I got 1 FPS, especially at night time. My game also crashed once because of this and strangely, the game decided to let you save only when you quit the game, making me lose 40 days+ of progress as a result.

Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

The game might be confusing and frustrating at the start, especially with the permadeath and the lack of tutorials. However, it proves itself to be enjoyable once you get the hang of it. Sadly, there is nothing that the game has to offer once you finished the game although the price is cheap enough to justify this reason.

Visit SaveOrQuit.com for detailed game reviews, posted daily!

This game is very similar to Kingdom: New land, but only one stage. There’s no collectible sign post, banker or various upgradable mounts or archer towers. Overall a more casual game. Great experience on deck.

Achievements are very similar as well. There are two achievements with incorrect or inaccurate descriptions: 1. The 4th day achievement need you to kill exactly the 10th deer on that day, nothing to do with 20; 2. For the 9th day, you have to maintain the tutorial on press L2 to gallop until gallop exactly on 9th day.

The most difficult achievement is probably to reach day 100. The real enemy is the lag. At around day 60-70, you will start to experience tremendous lags especially at night. So the real test is on patience.

After going through the ROYAL pain that is Kingdom: New Lands, I found out I also had the good ol' classic Kingdom game in my library. And I have to say, this original is way better than the new one. Sure, New Lands has more features and stuff, but it was so frustrating to figure things out and having my progress wiped by one crappy small fatal mistake, ones I ended up mkaing because the goal of New Lands didn't seem to sit right. Instead of building a Kingdom and surviving, New Lands had you, building a Kingdom and than abandoning it while fleeing on a ship your men can't seem to ever navigate correctly because it would always crashland onto the next land. But enough about that.

So Kingdom: Classic is what it's successor failed to be, a simple "survival" game. In this game, you are given a simple tutorial and are told to build, expand, and defend. That is what you do and your goal is to hold out as long as you can or to send out an army to destroy the enemy spawn points at the ends of the map, PERMANENTLY.

Everything you do in the game is done by collecting and using coins, you use coins to upgrade your buildings, you use coin to buy tools for your peasents, and you use coins to recruit beggers out in the woods to become your peasents. A word of caution however, just like in New Lands, clearing the last tree that covers one of these begger camps out in the woods will make it disapear, making it impossible to gain new units if you've destroyed all the camps.

Some things I've noticed in this game to be more friendly than New Lands is the wildlife spawnpoints. Here, they do not seem to disapear when within your borders making hunting still profitable even if you expand past previously rich hunting grounds. There are recruitment camps a plenty, and alot arn't sadistically placed unreachable behind enemy spawn portals. My favorite however has to be that... ENDLESS WINTER DOSEN'T EXIST!!!

This game can actually be played as a survival game because of it, I've only played one game so far but died gloriously, overrun by a massive enemy army with no where to run, but I enjoyed every moment of it way more than New Lands even though most of the gameplay is essentially the same.

There is however a couple noticable bugs I've seen, the hunters from both ends of your base seem to stick to the left on the days, it's not much of a problem in this game since as I've said earlier, the wildlife spawn points don't disapear when inside your base this time around, although it's possible that was a bug in itself. I've also noticed a horse spazzing out doing the moonwalk once I switched over to another, but nothing gamebreaking so far.

Unlike New Lands, I actually can see myself enjoying the Classic from time to time, I can definitley reccomend it. Kingdom: Classic is pretty much, Kingdom: New Lands, without all the BS, but also without the US, the coin crapping Unicorn from New Lands is sorely missed in this one...

I don't often play this game, but when I do, it's when I'm feeling truly miserable, when the dark thoughts creep to the edge of my mind and everything becomes hopeless. It is incredible to find such simple joy in sadness, in the impermanence of Civilisation, in the meaninglessness of it all, as I wander across the empty fields I cleared of trees, piles of ancient stones covering the clear horizon atop empty green moorlands, and as the mists begin to roll in... there's just such a simple joy in all of it, away from the injustices of the world, away from your failings and missed potential. It's easy to get lost, to want to just spend the rest of your life playing such games, experiencing nothing but escapism, but one day the rent will be due, one day your friends will miss you, one day you will die... Take joy in these things, in these beautiful experiences, but don't do so at the cost of the rest of your life. When you're done, go outside, read a book, learn to draw... don't abandon the experiences that help you get through the day, but don't let them consume you. Use them to fuel you. Because even if it's all meaningless in the end, even if our lives are brief and impermanent... That does not mean there is no joy in the world. Laughter is real. Love is real. Art is real. If this is your only life, enjoy the experiences it grants you while you still can, and do what you can to make sure others can do the same without hurting them, or yourself. Kingdom is a work of art, that through its sadness, helps me to cope with my problems, and feel a little bit more joy in the world. Thank you for reading my review. I know it says 10 hours on record, but I swears it on the precious that this isn't the first time I've had this game, I just haven't always had it on this account. I swears it. Pinky promise.

Fun game, better then new lands.

Worth the 5$ i paid for it, ignoring new lands.

The game is pretty vague about explaining stuff (as in, almost nothing),
so here are a few hints going in.

Get a lot of archers early on to hunt for money.
Every day go one side (left or right) and hire 2 - 4 people (switch sides, for respawns)
Find the trader, let him restock you. (mostly for me he also picked that which had lowest people of so easy balance)
Walls > Towers (make sure your catapult is moved eary in the morning, don't expand late)
Demon gates are teleporters, when destroyed -> on destruction a wave shows up make sure your wall is close cause your knights will ABANDON your archers...
Knights are cowards, they leave everyone to die (only good for destroying portals)
Build one farm at a time and make sure it's well protected cause they will just stand there and die if not.
The weird wooden statue is needed for further upgrading your kingdom
The archer and builder statue are buffs (really needed when you start destroying gates)

Also knights are cowards
Guess that's a bit of the basics

PS: knights are cowards

Kingdom is a great game, and a very challenging one at that. Infact, one of my favourite moments is when you finally get past that day 20 blood moon for the first time. It is great value for money and my hours in game isnt a fair representation of the time i have on this game because i play it on other accounts too.

It has a very small tutorial and then lets you explore the world however you want, so much freedom and choice! The game will punish you for even the smallest mistakes and you will quickly learn, i reset countless times on the first day of playing.

Pros:

Amazing sound

Beautiful visual design, I love how well 2D looks in this game

Days and Nights are just long enough to get what you set out to do done :)

Each day has a new challenge, literally...

Your asthmatic horse adds a real challenge

The steam achievements are really something to aim for and you will find it hard getting them all

Cons:

Very laggy at end game gameplay (due to so many archers probably)

(Some people may question this) - There is a lot of freedom ingame as the tutorial doesn't hold you back but some people argue that only being able to place towers in specific points is lack of freedom? Well i agree to a certain extent (thats why it is a con) but that is a challenge in the game! The first 2 towers are always near your castle and the others have to be planned ahead of time, you cant decide to build a wall 200 yards out the night before a blood moon! You have to THINK AHEAD.

The AI is poor. You can literally run rings around those massive ogre things and they can't hit you and just wait until daylight. Your archers venture so freaking far out at day that they don't even make it back in time at night... I'm not sure why but that needs a fix. It is frustrating.

Lack of late game challenges. I am at the point, well i was long ago, where i could win the game in the click of a button but i want to see how far my castle gets me. I could easily send my knights out to the portals and win but i want to see what the game has instore very late. At night 30+ you have probably learned how to manage your money and will be constantly overflowed in cash. This is a problem as i really can't lose past day 30, it is too easy for late game. (Maybe the monsters could be stronger and have more hp late game? instead of just trying too flood my walls and my catapult can 1-shot them all?) that is just a suggestion.

The game will crash a lot! Especially when you have lots of archers, so save every day because it has happened, when you crash and load back 8 nights ago!

Why did i buy the game?

We have all been there, watching your favourite youtuber play a brand new series and get destroyed on the first episode. Then we all think, "Ha! I could do better than that!" Well I couldn't. This game is very hard early game and as i have said, you get punished very easily. -_-

However, that wasn't the only reason, i absolutely love games where you can build massive armies and feel "powerfull". I certainly do now! If you like construction games or strategy or something like this in any way, give Kingdom a chance. It is very cheap and offers so much as each reset is randomly generated (sort of).

How to win (no spoilers)

As i have mentioned there is no tutorial but that doesn't mean go and search "how to beat kingdom" on google or youtube. The fun in this game is the fact that YOU make the mistakes and you have too complete it on your own!

If i would recommend any strategy it would be, you can never have enough archers, don't upgrade the bridges (you will find them on your own) until you have walls passed them, find the stone wall upgrade fast (not telling you where it is ;p).

Oh ye, and don't expand too fast, i really mean it. If you expand the monsters will tear through your level 1 walls and rampage through your town. Plan your expansions, the night after blood moons is a great time to expand!

Repetition

This game is one of those that is more addicting than Candy Crush, more fun than COD or CS:GO and will keep you playing until long after midnight. It is the constant "oh i will just play one more (ingame) night because if i go to sleep now i will forget what my plan was" what you don't realise is that you say that to yourself, every, freaking, time.

you will also get times when you restart of your own decision, not the fact that monsters just took your crown, this can be many reasons but the one that first got me was when; you buy the merchant on night 2 and he gives you four builders, then you find him again very soon, and he gives you four more builders. I just restarted after that.

There will also be times when you recover from disaster, one well placed boulder from the ogres lands right ontop of you mass gathering of stupid archers but somehow he doesn't break through your last wall and dies, then you panick and spend all your money repairing.

There will be times when you recover from disaster then make the biggest mistake and have to restart anyway.

In conclusion i absolutely love this game. It is well worth the price tag, and as i said at the start i have at least 50+ hours on other accounts. I would recommend this game to anyone! Even if you have a laptop worth £10 (well a bit more) you can run this game no problem.

Thanks for reading.

(This is one of my first reviews ever so give me a thumbs up if you like it) :D

I love this game.

Lately my life has been so busy, even when I have the time to sit down down and enjoy playing a game I rarely feel like doing it for more than 45 minutes or an hour. Kingdom has taken me back to what gaming use to be like for me: Losing hours of my life in a different world; Becoming completely immersed and forgetting about everything else.

It's hard for me to say exactly why this game is so great. At first it seems really basic, the entire game can be played with three buttons on the keyboard. Don't be fooled though, there is a lot of strategy here and the game will definitely kick your butt once or twice before you start getting the hang of it.

What makes this game special is not just gameplay though, it's the entire feel and atmosphere of the game. Whether or not you like pixel art, it's hard to call this game anything other than beautiful. The way day and night cycles, the sunsets, moonlight, fog, rain, clouds. Every day and night feels slightly different and it always feels special. This is complimented by the subtle yet suberb sound and music.

If you like the look of this game and think you'll enjoy it you probably will. Don't spend too much time researching it and potentially spoiling things for yourself, just know that it's a great experience and it is worth your time and money.