Kingdom, Dungeon, and Hero
Last updated: 2025-05-04
- Deep, engaging strategy RPG hybrid gameplay.
- Extensive editor enables high replayability.
- Clean and intuitive UI/UX design.
- Wargame with RPG and kingdom elements.
- Significant bugs and unfinished features present.
- Tedious and unrewarding dungeons.
Verdict
Mostly positive
Summary
Positive 78% · Negative 22%. Score: 22 / 100
Positives:
- The game offers a blend of deep strategy and RPG elements within an immersive fantasy setting, appealing to both wargame enthusiasts and those seeking engaging kingdom management and hero development. The active developer provides frequent updates and is responsive to community feedback, enhancing the overall experience.
- The game boasts a powerful and user-friendly editor, allowing players to create custom maps, scenarios, and campaigns. This feature, combined with the availability of mods and a random scenario generator, significantly extends the game's replayability and allows for emergent storytelling.
- The game features a clean, intuitive, and visually appealing UI/UX, making it easy for players to navigate and manage the game's various features. The map is also easily readable, enhancing the overall user experience.
- The game uses victory points instead of world conquest as the win condition. Victory Points are accumulated from different strategies, such as developing your economy or political connections, providing multiple paths to win.
- Extending supply lines and constructing granaries are important for military campaigns. These features add a layer of logistical consideration to the strategic gameplay.
Negatives:
- Multiple reviews cite technical issues, bugs, and incomplete features, including UI problems, localization errors, and unfinished text descriptions. Some players were unable to play for more than a few minutes due to these problems. This suggests the game may have been released prematurely.
- The dungeon crawling aspect is criticized for being tedious, unrewarding, and disjointed from other game mechanics. Players find the dungeon search system cumbersome and the rewards minimal, making it feel like a pointless side activity.
- The game suffers from inadequate tutorials, tooltips, and translations, making it difficult for players to understand mechanics and progress. Some translations are machine-generated and require community improvement. This creates a steep learning curve and hinders accessibility.
- Players report long AI turn times and questionable AI decision-making, such as failing to defend key locations or engaging in unfavorable battles. This impacts the pace of the game and the strategic challenge, making the AI feel weak and unresponsive.
- Heroes are seen as easily replaceable and their impact is unclear. Leveling them up is tedious and dangerous, and items obtained for them don't seem to have a noticeable effect, with missing tooltips adding to the confusion.
Gameplay:
- The game blends wargame mechanics with RPG and kingdom management elements. Players manage cities and resources, engage in diplomacy, recruit heroes, explore dungeons, and command armies in hex-based battles. This creates a multi-layered strategic experience.
- Heroes are versatile units that can lead armies, govern cities, and explore dungeons. They level up, acquire equipment, and possess unique skills, adding a layer of depth to both strategic and tactical gameplay. Team composition and scouting are important.
- Diplomacy plays a key role in securing alliances and creating buffer states. Aggressive expansion can lead to diplomatic repercussions, requiring players to carefully balance military growth with maintaining relationships with other factions. Diplomacy can also boost research and income.
- City management involves building structures for recruitment, economic development, and research. Cities require specialization due to building limits, and new cities cannot be founded, making existing city development crucial.
- The game offers multiple victory conditions, including earning victory points, collecting runes, or gathering corruption curses. This provides players with different paths to pursue based on their preferred playstyle.
Performance:
- The game is stable, smooth, and runs well on PC hardware. Additionally, the graphics are considered beautiful, enhancing the overall experience.
- Players have noted that AI turn processing can take a noticeable amount of time, which may interrupt the flow of gameplay.
- The game continues to run in the background even after the user exits, which can be unexpected and potentially impact system performance.
Recommendations:
- The game is highly recommended, especially for fans of strategy, wargames, and RPG elements. Reviewers highlight its blend of tabletop wargame mechanics with a fantasy setting, often comparing it favorably to similar titles. Many suggest it's a must-buy for enthusiasts of the genre.
- Several reviewers express concerns about the game's current state, citing shallowness, lack of polish, and a feeling of being incomplete. Some feel it's overpriced for what it offers, especially when compared to alternative games that provide a better experience for a similar or lower price. Some reviewers suggest waiting for a sale or choosing alternative titles.
- Reviewers see potential for future development, especially with the editor, workshop, and developer support. They hope for more depth, variety, and content updates to enhance the game's replayability and overall experience. The developer's effort to support multiple languages is also appreciated.
- These clusters express general positive sentiments or niche recommendations without providing specific details. They suggest the game is unique, fun, and suitable for certain audiences, but lack concrete examples or actionable feedback.
- Several reviewers suggest trying the demo before purchasing the game. This allows potential buyers to assess whether the game meets their expectations, especially considering concerns about its current state and price. Wishlisting is also recommended to track potential updates and sales.
Miscellaneous:
- The game includes a detailed editor for creating custom scenarios and realms, with new content already appearing in the workshop. The developer is also responsive to community feedback, suggesting continued support and potential improvements.
- The game is targeted towards wargame enthusiasts and is inspired by older titles like "Divine Right". It competes with other hybrid strategy/RPG games such as "Birthright", "Master of Magic", "Age of Wonders", "Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes", "Star Traders", "Expedition: Rome", "Battletech", and "Endless Legend".
- The game feels like an Early Access title and needs improvement. One reviewer faced backlash after sharing initial thoughts, and the demo was not representative of the full game experience.
- Diplomacy is present in the game, such as sending envoys to improve relations, but alliances are primarily useful for research. Trade heavily favors the AI, which strengthens them and makes diplomacy less impactful.
- The game features excellent written narrative, backstory, and flavor text. This contributes positively to the game's atmosphere and world-building.
