December 12, 2008
Relaxing Kingdom
I’ve been distracted for awhile, so I haven’t gotten back to it, but I gave in and bought A Kingdom for Kieflings recently, and I’m glad I did. On the surface, it looks really boring. Basically, it’s an RTS without the combat. It’s all tech tree and resource management. That’s the entire game. But it’s shockingly relaxing, fun, and rewarding. I just found myself sitting there, for long periods of time, just gathering resources and building buildings. The way the game unlocks new customization vectors is about right, too. No sooner are you getting bored with building things when you’ll unlock, say, a building to let you paint houses a bunch of new colors, or you’ll build a statue-maker to make gigantic statues in your honor, and then you have to go play with those and put them all about.
I think I’ve mentioned before how important podcast-friendly games are? This is the DEFINITION of such a game. It’s fun, but it’s not taxing. It keeps you busy while you listen to a podcast or music or whatever. It’s wonderful in that regard. It’s also the perfect “waiting for people to log on and invite me into Left 4 Dead” game, as you can play in tiny bursts and still make progress. Not to mention, it’s amazing how many hours of gameplay is in there. For my 10 bucks, I’m almost to 10 hours logged, I believe. Sadly, I don’t always get that much gameplay out of full priced games.
If you enjoy games that relax you, that are casual, like, say, Picross DS or Puzzle Quest or whatnot, you should really give this game a go. Ninjabee hit it out of the park with this one. I came in so very doubtful, downloading and deleting the demo several times, but it won me over, and I’m glad it did.