Kingdom: Two Crowns

Genre: Tower Defense

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local Splitscreen)

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Kingdom Majestic bundle, along with Kingdom: New Lands. It is also in is also in Kingdom Heritage Bundle, along with Kingdom Eighties. Additionally, it is also included in also in Kingdom Imperial Collection, along with Kingdom: New Lands and Kingdom Eighties.)

Kingdom: Two Crowns is a Tower Defense game that places you in the role of a nameless monarch collecting and spending coin to build up his expanding fortifications to defend against hordes of monsters, with the goal of eventually saving up enough to repair a wrecked ship to evacuate. Two Crowns is the third game in the series, and the second to appear on the Switch, with the prior entry being Kingdom: New Lands. I have copied a lot of the content from my review of the previous game into this review, because many of the comments I made still hold true in this entry.

Gameplay in Kingdom takes place from a side-scrolling perspective, with your king riding his horse left and right to give commands, collect currency, and inspect the territory. The game also makes use of a day-night system to show the passage of time, with nighttime heralding the impending approach of monsters.

Visually, this is a beautiful game. The pixel art style works very well for the game, especially the wonderful distorted reflection in the waters in the foreground. The soundtrack is also quite nice, with a generally mellow, somber vibe that reminded me just a bit of the tunes in Minecraft.

As for the gameplay… Hrm…

Okay, so here’s the thing. I really like the core fundamentals behind this game. This is a game that is clearly about resource management, and players will be challenged to balance the need to hire new workers, the need to assign them jobs as soldiers or builders, and the need to fund the construction of various types of buildings and fortifications. I really dig this, and find it to be really compelling.

Having said that, damn does this game make itself really difficult to enjoy. Despite that it has some really good gameplay at the center, there are all sorts of elements that mar or even outright ruin the experience in places.

First, you are given very little instruction. Just a basic rundown of how to hire workers and construct fortifications, and you’re pretty much left to your own devices. I understand wanting a minimalist experience, and I understand not wanting to hold players’ hands, but it’s ridiculous when I’m looking at potential structures I can build, and even after building them I have no damn idea what they do. The merchant who helped bring in cash disappeared and never returned… why was that? Enjoy looking it up in a Wiki, because the game won’t tell you a damn thing.

This lack of communicating information extends to informing you about your progression – how many builders do you have going about tasks? Have enemies taken out your Easternmost wall yet? What areas need repairs? What order will builders tackle the assignments you have pending? The game forces players to manually look over everything to find the answers to some of these, and even then sometimes those answers are not forthcoming.

Two Crowns does slightly better than New Lands in this regard, with the brief tutorial at the beginning going a bit longer, and with the game notifying you if your efforts are starting to go astray, but largely the same problems are still present here.

It gets worse. Say you spent money to tell your builders to work on multiple projects – you have no way to reassign them or cancel those projects. You can’t reassign a builder to become a soldier. Whenever you make a choice in this game, that choice is set in stone, and you are stuck with it.

Worse than that, players have no direct control over their people. If you know the enemy horde is approaching, you can’t tell your people to flee inside your fortifications for protection, or tell your builders to stop working on their current project and head to bolster the outer walls. At the very least the subject AI in this game seems a bit better than in the original, but it’s still something you often don’t have enough influence over.

Even basic things in this game are limiting and frustrating – you do not get to choose what sort of fortifications you build where. The sort of structures an area will produce are already predetermined, and you only get to choose whether or not to start building them.

The game even makes your damn horse get tires and resist your commands if you run around too much. Damn it, the game’s movement speed is slow enough as-is without having to slow-walk the damn horse all the time to keep it from getting tired.

In addition to small tweaks here and there, what Kingdom: Two Crowns adds onto the previous game is largely more content – more unit types, more building types, more biomes… there’s even a cooperative multiplayer mode. However, the main problems with this series all still persist here, despite that this is the better game of the two.

All of the game’s problems pile up to just be this massive amount of frustration that makes it really hard to enjoy Kingdom: Two Crowns, despite that fun gameplay seems to be lurking juuuuust under its surface. But with all of these problems plaguing players, I just can’t give this game a high recommendation, even though it has a lot of good qualities.

tl;dr – Kingdom: Two Crowns is the third game in this side-scrolling Tower Defense series, and the second on the Switch. While it has some nice pixel art visuals and some strong core gameplay, and while added content and features make this the best game yet in the series, this game is still plagued with all sorts of frustrations that make it feel like a thankless chore. The result is something only the most patient players will enjoy.

Grade: C+

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