A Handful of Keflings

I absolutely love the kefling games and I absolutely understand why they designed it the way they did, In some ways it feels just like a kefling game. but as of right now, it doesn't look like it has very much meat to it. The controls are weird, they try to give you some ghost hand but it just ends up being a glitchy mess more times than not, in my opinion, it would probably be best to get rid of the ghost hand and just keep it on the harvesting animation. maybe add a destroying animation because I've accidently destroyed buildings because of how fidgety the ghost hand is. The graphics are find but it kind of looks a little strange through my vive, no options to adjust anything. and my biggest peeve is that you don't really feel like a Giant. I just feel like I'm playing tabletop simulator. I remember playing Kefling on xbox when you could be your avatar, there was so much sense of exploration, but this game is kind of dissapointing. It's not worth $15 in my opinion, nor the $20 it will be normally. I wouldn't recomend until further updated.

Last updated Jan/2018.... abandoned game? Seems like it, avoid.

This is pretty watered down compared to the console game.

A Handful of Keflings is a simple, VR, city-building and management game. [h1] Video Preview [/h1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8b04HMjR6E [h1] Written Review [/h1] This is the third game in the series, and the first on Steam & VR. The main premise is you are a giant, and your main goal is to help the Keflings build their Kingdom by making building after building. You start off with a blueprint for a house. In order to build it, you must put the 4 correct pieces together. In this case, a bed, a cauldron, a fireplace, and a heart. The heart is a special item that you will get occasionally while progressing through the game. The other pieces are like most in the game, which require you to harvest materials that you find throughout the world. Trees, rocks, crystals etc. You can either gather these yourself by simply holding the trigger on the resource, or by placing a Kefling onto the resource, so that they may start gathering it. You get more Keflings over time as you create more houses, so the speed at which you gather materials is limited to how far into the game you are. This allows for a nice feeling of progression as you go through. You will slowly see your kingdom grow, as more and more people are mining. On top of that, you will get some permanent upgrades as you build different types of buildings. For example, a Lumbermill will allow you to harvest twice as much wood from trees. In the older games, I personally enjoyed the system to obtaining these upgrades a bit more. Instead of having it simply handed to you via doing what you're meant to. You instead had to usually seek them out throughout the world. You could freely walk, and find secret areas. Either finding them on a secluded island, where you had to build a bridge to reach, or finding them under a resource that you've depleted. That doesn't really exist in this game, as instead of walking around the world, it's more like a table in front of you. You can drag the world left and right to go back and forth, and while it's quite large on both sides, you don't really get the same experience as you did in the previous games. The older games also had unique Keflings you could talk to, which had funny and unique personalities. I haven't met any of them in my time in this current game, which is quite disappointing since that really helped build the world. In the previous game in the series, you also had different biomes. You could build a kingdom in the desert, snow or forest. Each had their own unique materials, which made visiting them feel different. In this game, the biomes only change in the background. As in, you will see a snowy mountain, but in the foreground where you can harvest and build, it's green, just like the starting area, with normal trees. You don't feel the same variety you did in the previous game. A mechanic in the series was simplified in this game, and I can see it being a positive or negative depending on the person playing. In the older games, resources that were gathered had to be transported to the specific building that was going to use them to produce pieces. So, if you had a Kefling gathering wood, you would either take it to the workshop, or Lumbermill, or factory. If you wanted all of those things getting an income of wood, you would need to tell individual Keflings to take wood to all of those buildings. Which meant the game allowed you to assign Transporter Keflings. Their job was to just take Resource from point A, and take it to B. This meant that in the end, you basically had a large conveyor belt of Keflings take materials around. I personally got satisfaction out of that. Although it could at times be a bit tedious to go back and forth, assigning them to do this, it felt rewarding in the end. In this game, the Kefling that mines the resource will always drop it off themselves. At a designated drop off point. Once it has been dropped off, it is in your global inventory, that is shared across all buildings. Meaning, if a Kefling drops off wood in the workshop, you can now produce planks at the Lumbermill, without the need to physically take the wood to the Lumbermill beforehand. Although I can see the appeal behind this, I felt it gives you less options when it comes to running the place. But I can understand that someone might enjoy this change. Especially considering you are in VR, which might make it more cumbersome to actually physically move all the objects. Speaking of moving objects, it's all in a grid system, with no physics. Meaning you can point at an object in the distance, and press the trigger to have it teleport to your hand. You then point at the tile you want to place it in, and voila, it's done. As opposed to physically bending over and grabbing it. Which is nice in my opinion, since you would be doing a lot of bending since you're a giant. Although, I would have liked the option to throw keflings around like in the older games, but it's definitely not a necessity. The menu that you do most of your work in is a big problem in my eyes. This is where you view your inventory, blueprints etc. This menu is at the back of the world and has small text. Reading it with the current Vive's resolution was not that great. Most people that have played VR frequently will know that distant and small text is not a joy to read. It's pixely and just a bit of a strain to look at. I have personally never worn an Oculus headset so I can't say how much better it would be, but I can't imagine it being perfect. I would have much preferred bigger text, or possibly bringing the menu closer. Perhaps at your feet, or on your hand. Or maybe we just need to wait for the resolution on VR headsets to increase. The music is great. Unfortunately, it's only one song at the moment. A song from the first game. The first game had a lot more songs, so that's quite a strange choice. I can see it getting very repetitive after a few hours of play. Still, a lovely song. The aesthetic and graphics are really cute and beautiful. Everything is vibrant, the models look nice, you can pick things up and look at them up close. It's fun to be in this colourful world. To sum it up, unique characters, a bit more story, more music, exploration and multiplayer would be welcome features from the older games. Overall, although the game lacks a few things from the previous games that I would love to see patched in at some point in the future, it's still a fun game for people who are into management. At a simpler level. There isn't anything overly complex about it. It's just a chill game where you get a bit of a rewarding, progression feeling. Recommended!

Really relaxing game. A few features missing from the originals, but still very enjoyable. I would definitely recommend as an easy going game.

I've never played the other games in this series, but this is pretty fun! You grow your village to gather resources and work your way through a tech tree to build more complex buildings. Each building is assembled from a specific set of building blocks and you can easily select a recipe to figure out what to build. Each person can have one resource gathering job, but if you need quick burst of any resource you can also help gather it. After a little bit you'll run out of 'table space' and can scroll over to get more. There's ways to focus on efficiency, but for the most part it's just a game to relax with. As far as I can tell there's no fail state or any conflict. It's just growing for the sake of growing until maybe your grow the last possible thing in the list. The art is cute, but also a little bland. There's a height adjustment so that anyone should be able to play.

I purchased not realizing it was a v/r game and I dont have any v/r gear.

How the * meh *does this game work, sometimes you'll just zoom out, or zoom in...What it the purpose? How do you play this wreck of a game... Dont buy, you'd be better off with deism. Same category but much better!

After giving this game a second chance, Biggest flaw is the save system is broken to the point where you will never progress when you "save and quit" the game as it just reverts to the old save file and all the progress is lost.

Huge fan of the other 2 Kefling games from years past. Problems with controls have been fixed and this game ran/controlled great for me. I've always thought of these games as Age of Empires with no combat whatsoever, just all resource gathering and chill times. This game's no different in that sense from it's predecessors, but it is much simpler, which makes sense for VR. The complexity is in planning out your resource chains and city layout (for maximum efficiency). Overall I'd recommend this game, but idk if i'll go back and finish it, it doesn't have that same pull as the older games did for me.