Kingdom: New Lands

Kingdom: New Lands is a 2D city building/defense game with pixelated graphics that seemed to have acquired a cult following since its release. I'm not a big fan of this modern trend in some games to have little to no tutorials on the game mechanics and leaves the player up to discover how things work. It can work sometimes but on Kingdom New Lands knowing exactly how each unit work is absolutely essential for success, which makes the game pretty frustrating and you'll need to check out some guides to get things going after a few failed runs.

There's not much going on as far as controls, you can only move left or right into a long map and you pick up coins and invest those in buildings by pressing the down button. You'll recruit wanderers and they will becomes archers, builders or farmers depending on what tools you purchase. All these units are automated and here comes the frustration: you won't know why they aren't doing what they are supposed to do. With is the archer not hunting the bunny just outside the base? Why is my farmer not doing anything? All of these things are essential to know and the game won't tell you anything about it. I guess this is the appeal of the game, but for me it's just a pain in the ass element especially how everything is so crucial and doing a few wrong moves might wreck your economy totally. You will fail your first few games and try to do better on the next ones.

Every day at night there are these ghost-like monsters that attack you, so you need to build these towers where archers go in and defend along with some walls. It's important to manage your coins properly so you have enough defenses but also have some archers hunting (or farmers, but that is more complicated). As you progress in days, the enemies get stronger and stronger so you'll need to speed up the pace to build the boat to go to the next area. Once you get there you start over in a new base (but you get to keep some of your archers/builders) but the difficulty is higher with more raids and a weirder landscape. I haven't gotten past the 2nd area, but there's apparently 6 areas to do which I imagine must be really challenging as the game is already punishing early on.

I can sort of understand the dedicated fanbase for this series of games, but I don't think it's exactly for me. I'm not a big fan of the mechanics, but it's still enjoyable playing. It's kind of relaxing to play and you can easily get lost into it, and very challenging despite it's limited options. There's lots of trial and error to do, but starting over just feels so frustrating that I don't think I could take much more of that. It's worth a try for strategy fans, it might just click but not exactly what I'm looking for.