Kingdom Conquer

Received for free to assist with testing, but have since purchased my copy of the game for a friend's account. Kingdom Conquer plays like a unique fusion of Mount & Blade, Age of Empires & Minecraft with some rogue-lite splashes. The game is played in turns, alternating between growing your kingdom before conquering territory from enemy NPC clans. The game's biggest selling point is its replay value, as the variety of settings to customize your campaign from the start, combined with the procedural world generation, means that every playthrough is different. The default setting has you play an intimate 1v1 game on a tiny map which can be completed in roughly 1-2 hours. This is where the game feels most like a RTS match. But where I think the game shines is the ability to up the enemy clan count & map size to create some grand scale, long lasting & chaotic campaigns to sink your teeth into over multiple play sessions. As rival clans attack each other, the world comes alive & creates dynamic situations to challenge the player with. A game against 5 enemy clans on the medium map size setting took me 18 in-game turns (roughly 14 hours of play) before I had conquered the continent as the last kingdom standing. And after all that, I've yet to tire of the core gameplay loop & am excited to experience what the current maximum settings of 11 enemy clans on the largest map size can offer - which I'm sure will take me some time to chew through. For specifics, the early game begins the player alone, manually gathering resources to get your kingdom started. But the burden of managing your economy very quickly shifts to your settlers as more show up each turn & can be tasked as various resource gatherers, item producers, or soldiers to accompany you into battle. And by the mid game, the focus of the player turns toward the war effort: repelling invaders, equipping your armies with the best gear, investing in upgrades for them, and seeking out additional god statues that upgrade the player's personal stats & turn you into a real powerhouse by the late-game. Kingdom Conquer has a charming & cosy low-poly artstyle that frequently looks beautiful thanks to the real-time day/night lighting cycles + weather combinations(the water even freezes over during winter, changing the way the map tiles are navigated during combat), but most importantly the game performs smoothly & has a very small download size. At the time of this review, the game could certainly do with handful of additional patches to fix some bugs & add a layer of polish. The current build does contain a memory leak that starts to noticeably affect load times after playing a session for over 3 hours, but relaunching the game does immediately fix this. Also, some additional content to increase the variety of possible kingdom builds, player progression, & enemy diversity would go a long way towards increasing that core replay value further. But overall my experience has been a positive one, & even in the game's launch state, the foundation is strong enough that by the time I have finished my next playthrough, I am confident I will have more than gotten my money's worth. (I will update this review once I have completed a game on the largest possible settings, and if future patches introduce welcome fixes/content additions)