I played "New Lands" for 200 hours, so you know where I'm coming from. I'm just mentioning my thoughts as a veteran of the previous games. I've only played alone so far.

Pros:
- You can upgrade towers 2 more tiers, in both of them the people inside the tower are completely safe, not even attacks from air can get them. This is great!
- Boosters (stronger archers, walls, knights, farmers) only have to be enabled once and then will stay active until you die - they even stay enabled when you go to another island!
- A very cool new way to finally destroy the big portal in the cliff - I won't spoil how, you will love it. It requires a good bit of preparation, which is part of the fun.
- I think people that you recruit in far away villages have an easier time getting to you, because even when they lose their coin, they often make it to you instead of walking back to their village.
- Spear guys can get fish out of water even during winter; so if you take too long you still get an ok income (warning: in the japan setting these don't exist; instead there is another new unit type that doesn't earn money during winter; to compensate that, there are way more trees in Japan to compensate for that, and you can get up to 3 coins for knocking down a tree)
- There are now rotating seasons, so in case of winter you just have to wait. Every season takes 16 days. Winter is from day 48-64
- Putting money into the bank of your castle is now really useful because of the winter season
- You can return to previous islands whenever you built the boat and everything will be more or less as you left it (some walls will be destroyed and people will have lost their weapons though)
- You don't have to bring the boat across the whole map anymore, you just have to build it and then hop in.
- You just have to upgrade the stone upgrade once in the entire game, not on every island; same for the other material upgrade that was added.
- More base and wall upgrades
- Base now expands depending on where is enough room behind your walls and how high the walls are upgraded; the scythe shop will for example now appear outside your base as it used to.
- There is a wall everywhere behind your base; so being inside and outside your base feels really different.
- New mounts (one is pretty cool, the other is rather 'meh')
- If you lose a hermit, you can get it back by returning to that island again and he will be back in his hut
- Knight upgrade giving them twice as much coin storage/armor (5->10)
- One (?) hermit will join your boat the moment you enter it plus the one you have on your horse, so I could bring 2 hermits with me to another island. Not sure if it can even be more.
- If you destroy the portal on the dock, you can build a lighthouse on a rock in the water, which prevents the boat from getting destroyed the next time you go to this island
- Cute new animations

Other changes:
- A lot has been rebalanced. Some things cost a lot more, some run faster some slower. You seem to get much less coins from rabbits, but you can now also get some from fish.
- You have to unlock all sorts of buildings and mounts with gems once before you can use them. It forces you to stratetically switch between islands and go back to previous ones.
- Separate catapult buildings left and right and an additional upgrade
- There are very very few water places to build farms on. You will hardly ever get a proper farm running in the entire game.
- All nights as very easy, it's only a few standard monsters. Only when you destroy a portal it can get dangerous in the following blood moon night
- You can choose an additional japan-setting, which is just a reskin of the game but apart from that it's the same
- If you die/lose the crown you will respawn on island 1 and all upgrades will be disabled - you keep your people and buildings on each island
- New hermits (Spoiler: one upgrades a farm and attracts all mounts that you owned, even across islands - the other one calls all fighters to one side [this one sort of sucks because you cannot be sure anymore that enemies come from the opposite side from the destroyed portal, so you don't know where you have to defend; but if the portals on one side are all destroyed it can be useful])
- Lots of new little things

Contras:
- The art style is done sloppily here. You can now tell it's done in a 3d engine and it's not really 2d. You have pixel objects rotating, so the pixels are not real pixels anymore. Sometimes pixels have different sizes; making the whole style look unpolished and wrong.
- Gems taking up a lot of space in your pocket and it makes it harder to see how many coins you have.
- Still can't see which of your people carry coins
- If you arrive on a new island just as winter starts, you're screwed, because you can't take spear-men with you on the boat. So don't do that! They should seriously fix this by allowing spearmen on boat.
- Spearmen don't pickup coins, so if no one is near them to pick up their coins, they will just vanish at some point
- The knight booster-upgrade still sucks when you are defending, because they will keep dashing through the wall and then get killed
- Can't see how many coins the knights have, you just have to try giving them coins and see if they accept them
- Most of the time I didn't survive destroying the big end portals and wouldn't know how to prevent it; you still win but you have to go through all islands again to reactivate the boosters
- The pocket feels too small in this game, even more than in the previous ones. Because many things will cost 20 coins, even switching a mount costs 14. And if you have gems in your pocket hardly any money fits in. At least some pocket upgrade would have been cool.
- Hermits jumping off when you don't want it to and not jumping off when you want to




Some random thoughts:

It took me 22 hours to get to the end credits.
Two Crowns adds a satisfaction to the game that the previous one could never give me. This is mostly related to the way to finally destroy the big end portal and the big preparation that goes into it.

There is one booster, one mount and one hermit on each island, so to be properly prepared for the 5th and last island you have to go through all previous islands and activate the boosters that you need (archer and walls certainly; the others don't seem important) and you will want to bring a bakery-hermit to the final island.

You can switch back and forth between islands but you have to build the boat everytime to do so. It gets a bit tedious lateron; especially when you are on an island that contains no more enemies at all, it turns into an annoying grind.

It's sad that the farmers are completely irrelevant, or is it? You rely completely on hunting rabbits and fish now.

I didn't have the experience that the only villages were very far away behind 3 portals on each side - maybe I was lucky, but I was never completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥ without a bakery as you were in the later levels of "New lands". Life with a baker is much easier, but it's also okish without one.

One of the new mounts is pretty cool - you can destroy an entire army of monsters all by yourself with little skill. But it has a terrible stamina!

If you manage to get a stable and have different mounts right in your base, it's pretty cool, so you can easily switch. But for some reason when I built a stable it only attracted the mounts that I owned before. It did not attract the mount that I first got shortly after. I don't know if there is a 3 mount limit or it's a bug. I was surprised to see the mount there that I didn't even bring to that island but had on another island.

This is an edit to a 3 year old review, which was negative. The reasons are described below. I just played the Norse Lands Demo and by thors hammer, it was great. It is immediately visible that the pixel art is even better than before, very clear and subtly masterful. The soundscape is fantastic - i'm not sure if it was like that before, but the ambience is great. I love that the music both feels fitting, but also ventures a bit into another direction. I spent a few scenes in the fog or at sunset that really moved me, where i felt exactly what i felt when i fell in love with Kingdom. Because of that, i tentatively changed the review to positive. The issues below were rage inducing when trying to progress, but the game does so much right in the other departments and improved upon it, that negative does not feel justified. After all, i recommended it very often in real life.
I have a disclaimer though, that i found very disappointing. I found myself riding with a hermit through the woods, with 2 coins in the afternoon. Greed appeared on the side, surprisingly - which prompted the hermit to get off my horse. What an idiot, i half expected this. I quickly spent a coin getting him back up, being careful not to accidentally build something - and wouldn't you know it, he got down from the horse after 5 steps again. So, hermits suicidal as ever. I don't understand why i can't just hit up or hold up to set one down, but have to wait ages until one goes down from the horse - unless he finds himself in the worst possible situation to get down (a chance he doesn't want to miss!).
Because of this, the "positive" is tentatively. If i feel like rage quitting again because the hermits go crazy, my rational thought will be gone, probably :P


Original Review:
I'm happy that there is a new episode in this series. I don't even mind that a buy basically the same game a third time, not at all.
I have two three big issues with the game.

First of all, the gems are not fitting the style of the game, very clunky mechanic. The gems are finite in the campaign. You have no way of figuring out how many there are, and how many you can potentially spend. The things you spend it on usually only show their merit upon buying. In my first run, i bought everything and had to restart after many hours, because some crucial upgrades were simply not unlockable anymore. This is a hurtful mechanic for the game, as it seemed to value exploration and trial&error before. This way, trial and error becomes prohibitive and you basically have to rely on a wiki or restart completely once you saw everything, which robs you from curiosity.

(update: the hermit behaviour is probably fixed as of 19.12.2018. I will update this if i can verify they behave properly now)
Secondly, the brain dead hermits. I had to restart my second and third campaign because a hermit left the safe area of my kingdom, wandered into the woods and got captured. You have no way of ever getting them back. Again, worst case is you cannot (in any sane way) finish the campaign and have to restart. Which i did. I then took great care of my hermits...until one evening, the smith that was standing at the wall for 3 days, decided out of the blue to wander directly into the hoard of greed that were slamming against the wall he was behind, leading to his capture. What the actual ♥♥♥♥. They seem incredibly intent on getting captured. Once i found the smith standing a huge distance from the outermost wall, despite having tons of space on the inside. If i had not randomly walked by, he would have been gone.

Lastly, the seasons. While it can work nicely and create some tension, it can also be incredibly boring and take out all fun. Ever had to wait 20 ingame days, doing nothing, until winter is over? I think i ran into another bug when i was in the middle of summer and suddenly, on destroying my first portal, it was immediate winter. My kingdom is strong, but i have no savings as it was not even autumn yet. So now i have to wait 20 days doing nothing in the hopes that this apparent bug will not prevent spring.

There are also a lot of smaller things. Once you have a boat, you cannot attack a portal in that direction anymore, because your knights will rather go into the boat. Other thing, if you upgrade your squires to knight you basically signed their death warrant, because they like to jump outside of the walls and get themself killed. Next thing, thinking about going back to an old island? Better be fast with buildup, because your old small settlement (without any walls now) will meet just as big waves as your recent island.

I just cannot recommend it like it is. While it has a great atmosphere and i love the coop aspect, i cannot deal with the fact that i'll have to restart over and over again because of bugs. And it's not like "hey, the game is new, give some time to patch things" - these behaviours existed also for the same game released 3 years prior. I do not expect them to get fixed, this just looks sloppy.

Kingdom Two Crowns is the best Kingdom, It has everything from both previous games and a lot of extras like Multiplayer, cycling seasons, A new tech tier and a bomb to get rid of the greed for good.

Kingdom like both previous games is set in a universe where the Greed tries to take the crown, You have to build your kingdom, hire peasants and give them tools to do tasks for you. That is the story, There is a tutorial ghost which only explains the mechanics, There are npcs who do stuff, but none of them talk, everyone is a mute here, Money talks. You can actually complete the game now, But there is not even a slideshow at the end, The first night will tell the story. I do think this fits the game nicely, A small slideshow at the end could be nice, but Story elements in the beginning or during the gmae will get annoying after the tenth time.

In kingdom you are a pretty useless monarch on its own, Your only ability is riding your mount and dropping coins, But money is power, You must drop coins so the Vagrants pick one up and become peasants for your kingdom, Peasants will run towards your kingdom and pick up the first tool they see, You must buy these tools from the shops in your kingdom, Each tool makes a peasant a different class, A worker who can build carry and repair stuff, Archers who fire arrows, Farmers who earn money on farms, Pikemen who stab trough the walls and fish during the day, Squires who lead a group of archers and are used for attacking portals, Swords are upgrades for the Squires so they become Knights.

There are several upgrades on the different islands, There are mines that allow you to jump to the next technology age, Which allows you to further upgrade farms, Towers, Walls, etc. There are statues that allow you to upgrade a certain class of people, But also different mounts which have perks, Hermits which allow you to create specific structures and even a dog which will warn you if the greed is coming All these upgrades will remain as long as you keep your crown.

The game adds a lot of new stuff, You can play split screen, or online with a friend, Winter is not endless anymore, And there is actually a way to earn some money in this season, And there is also a bomb you can build to enter the portals and eliminate the greed on that island. The game has a bunch of challenge islands like Skull, Plague and Dire Island. These Challenge islands are in the old style, where losing the crown is the end, It are nice persistant challenges that allow you to set personal high scores especially Plague Island.

The biggest difference in the main campaign gameplay is the removal of permadeath, Which is a shame in my opinion. Surely we have a lot more content now, And I agree it is a shame if most people did not even saw 10% of that, But removing the permadeath removes the challenge. Once you die now you get a new monarch and start back on Island 1, everything will still be there, If you defeated the greed they will still be gone. There is a decay system and if you are not present on the island it will decay slowly, from outside in, Wall by wall, untill there is nothing left, but the greed will never come back once defeated.

The game looks like an improved version of the last 2 games, It added small details, A few different monarchs, You can also choose which biome you want to play in, currently we have Europe and Japan, But I heard more will be coming. 2 Crowns also has a huge soundtrack compared to the first game and especially compared to the second game, It is nice and fits the atmosphere, Some scenes look just magical.

The performance is great, It does have a few bugs here and there, But they will be ironed out, I am missing some graphical settings like the ability to turn off vsync, I also notice small framedrops when there are hundreds of archers and greed on the screen, I did not have those in the previous games.

Endgame there is nothing to do, The greed won't come anymore, You can just upgrade everything on every island untill there is nothing left to upgrade, You can ofcourse start a new game But it will be the same game. The islands are re generated tho, The challenge islands are a big pro here, They actually offer the rogue like challenge from the older Kingdom games, You die and you have to start over, Which sounds harsh, But where is the challenge otherwise? We currently have 3 challenge islands, But I expect we will see more in the future.

First up are the controls, I think double tap a direction to run on the keyboard is fine, But it gets a bit tricky with a controller, I prefer to just use one of the triggers to run. It would be very nice if we could disable double tap to run in the settings somewhere. And same thing for the tutorial ghost it should be optional, It can get annoying, Even endgame it tries to lure you to the edge of the map only to dissappear.

Ability to break down and cancel structures, Like that accidental wall you placed outside your camp, or that need to be chopped down tree all your workers keep on sacrificing themselfes for. It would also be nice if we could re plant trees and make certain structures re appear, Like the Vagrant Camps and the Merchant Huts. How many times I had my friends in coop chop down the wrong tree only to have the map ruined.

A minimap, Which shows you where on the island you are, In coop this could be just 2 player icons on the seperator line between the 2 screens, It gets very confusing when portals teleport you because you built a linked portal. A minimap would solve this minor issue. A more simple way to adjust your blazon would also be appreciated, The strange codes we need to enter now are a bit strange, Something that is in place for the colors would be a nice start.

Maybe the ability to reset islands with increasing difficulity to keep the game challenging, reset a mistake or clean up achievements instead of having to start a new game to reset the island. I would also love to see more gamemodes for coop, The challenge islands are few but nice, But why not have all of them in coop too? They can have different goals or leaderboards if that is the issue. I would also love a classic mode for the main campaign, Where dying is just the end as the only difference.

Overall the game surely improved over the last 2 games, It added a lot, The biggest change is that losing your crown is not the end anymore, Which is a pro and a con in my opinion, It completely removes the challenge, But I can see how this also allows most people to actually complete the game.

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rentoa oman pienen valtakunnan rakentelua. peli rankaisee nopeasti liian nopeasta etenemisestä muttei kuitenkaan hankaloita rakentamasta kaikkea uudestaan. Parhaimmillaan coop jolloin eteneminen tehokkaampaa.

Kingdom Two Crowns is a hard game to rate. It's good, and if you look at it by itself then it's definitely worth it. However, if you played either of the previous games then it feels like nothing more than a mini multiplayer expansion. There are a couple new mounts and 1 new weapon but I felt like I was just playing kingdom new lands again. The levels felt the same, the monsters were the same and basically everything was the same minus a couple small features that you probably wouldn't even notice unless you're a diehard fan.

Kingdom two crowns is a superior version of the game, because it's basically 95% the same game as new lands but with a couple new features. If you're a new player then buy this game and only this game, you don't need to play the previous versions. If you're a new lands player, then really consider if you want to buy this game full price for a couple new features.

I think two crowns was the result of the devs promising too much. This was probably meant as an expansion for new lands, but since they promised all future dlc for free, they had no choice but to make it a separate game.

I'm leaving this a good review because the game is good. However, I don't recommend it to older players unless 1) You were a huge fan and want to support the devs regardless 2) It's on a really big sale or 3) You want to play it with friends..... Because let's be honest, you're paying full price for what should basically be a free expansion (due to their promises of all future dlc being free).

It's really a shame, because kingdom two crowns is a great product. It's just not a 20$ product when you already own kingdom new lands.

Very chill game, a very good game to play after a long time of playing very intensive or violent games.

This game holds a special place for me. It allowed me to spend time with someone with whom I can no longer spend that time with, a memory that I best leave behind me. As such, I'm storing it aside and hiding it in the corner not to be seen again - but before I do that, I'll leave a quick review as my last words of goodbye to a game I once enjoyed playing with someone I spent most of my days with, and had them constantly in my thoughts.

A simple strategy-defense game, this current title of Kingdom allows you to play with a friend either locally or over the world. Do not worry - if one of you loses their crown, the other one will be able to retrieve it back by buying a new one.

Unlike the previous titles, which sent you an endless waves of monsters called Greed that you could never defeat, you are no longer bound to an eternal winter where you either fall slowly to a certain doom or escape to another Island to repeat the cycle. No, now you have fighting chance!

Build, expand, defend, reconquer.

Where each Kingdom title so far had these 3 first instructions, Two Crowns should add "reconquer" as you can finally put an end to the Greed and save your kingdom.

Two Crowns allows you long term survivability and the ability to enter the portal and fight back the Greed. Winter no longer lasts forever, and you can survive it by collecting berries.

At first, you won't be able to destroy the portals as you'll need to discover new 'technologies' and gain the ability to recruit armies and build catapults.

Only around the third Island is when you finally get a proper chance to get back at the Greed. Open your map, return to your old castles, and finish the fight.

While my kingdom slowly deteriorates and crumble, I hope your's will grow and evolve. Just remember to leave some forest for the deer to enjoy running freely, after all you can include them within your walls =)

Everything about this game is beautiful.. like the person who gave it to me as a gift

There are a lot of things about this game that are big improvements on the original; the change from perma death to a heavily penalized death and the addition of co-op being the most notable; but two new mechanics absolutely RUIN the game:

The first is winter-
I'm not opposed to the idea of a seasonal change mechanic, but the impilmentation at the moment is horrible. When winter comes around, your crops (the primary means of income) die, animals that your archers hunt (your secondary means of income) despawn, and grass patches (which allow you to regenerate your mount's stamina) dry up and no longer function. You're left with a slowed and perpetually exhausted mount and the trickle of income from spearmen fishing. Essentially... all gameplay stops.
The Devs should take a serious look at games that did winter (and other seasonal changes) well, like Don't Starve. In Don't Starve winter brings new challenges and new things to explore. It doesn't just arbitrarily slow the game to a crawl like in Kingdom.

The second are gems-
Once again, a good idea with terrible execution. Gems act as a new limited and valuable resource to obtain higher tier upgrades like shrines that buff your whole kingdom or new mounts for your king with special abilities. The issue is that these gems are only obtainable from non-respawning chests in newly explored islands, so if you lose the gems to the Greed, or get a game over, they're gone for good. The gems being limited in this way basically negates the new respawn mechanic. Sure, if you die, you'll respawn on the first island now, but if you were carrying any gems on you when you bit the dust your save may as well have been deleted like in the original Kingdom.
The gems should be obtainable in some difficult, but renewable, way. Maybe you could get one for every 1000 coins you leave at the banker or something. At the very least you should be able to retrieve lost gems by destroying the Greed portals that they were taken to.

Overall, the game is very very good, but winter and perma-lost gems need to be adressed ASAP.

Edit: (1/2/19)
Enough comments have been made, that I feel the need address a couple of things:

First, several people have said they've been getting back their lost gems after clearing islands. In my personal experience, and in the experience of some other players, that hasn't been the case. It could be a bug, but the info posted by the dev in the FAQ and Update Road Map imply that a way of recovering gems hasn't been added yet and is planned for sometime in the future, so.... No clue...

Second, in regards to winter, there's a big difference between tedium and difficulty. The issue I have with winter in the current version of Kingdom isn't that it's "too hard" it's that its just straight up boring: Don't Starve's winter is difficult but engaging, Kingdom's winter is easy, but tedious.

Third, this review is in no way some slight against the devs, I loved Kingdom Classic (unfortunately missed New Lands) and I enjoy a large portion of the new features in Two Crowns. I wouldn't even bother leaving a review if I thought the game was irredeemably bad.

I can't recommend this game at this point. Especially in multiplayer mode, there are so many syncronisation bugs just to get the game to work properly you sometimes need to restart the game 2 or 3 times.

Besides that there are countless other frustrating bugs that make the game unplayable when you're going into the endgame.

Should those bugs get fixed I will definitely reconsider the game, because it would be a great game if it wasn't for the bugs!