Kingdom Elemental

I'm sure I bought this in 2006 direct from the developer. It's good to see it make it onto Steam where it will get a lot more exposure/recognition. Anyway, its basically an MMORPG party strategy simulator, taking you and a mix of adventuring classes and abilities through waves of nasties. Positioning, timing of abilities, and party composition all play a part. Tanking, healing, ranged dps, off-tanks, aggro management, crowd control, its all there. If you enjoy MMO raids, and the way different classes can meld together to make something much more powerful than a lone solo session - then you'll be right at home with this game. The humour is an added bonus, the graphics are not spectacular, not even current generation, but they are functional. The action is hectic in real time, but luckily theres a pause facility that lets you plan your next move or attack - so you can constantly react to changing tactical events, and take the battle on at your pace. I think its been polished up a lot more than the original release, and it seems more accessible than I remember. The "campaign mode", allows you to progress through the game, unlocking different classes and different skills, using the currency of victory (unlock points) and fixed gold amounts to build up your custom party of adventurers to try out on the next wave of enemies. Very enjoyable, and certainly good value if you enjoy a short burst of class based fantasy tactical action.

Although I enjoyed the simple mechanics and fighting battle after battle without needless walking, I simply can't recommend this game. The game sucks you in with the tutorial offering humor and a satirical view on the RPGs today. The combat is very simple, you unlock units and their skills (you get unlock points in each new level) and then you choose which units will be in the fight by buying them with gold (you get a fixed amount of gold every round). Unit composition, positioning and timely skill use is all needed to win battles. There is no story and you really have no idea why you fight the enemies that you fight. Although there are some attempts at humor between levels the subtitles lag behind the voice acting, which I found really annoying and disengaging. The lack of story however wouldn't be such a bad thing, since most of them are generic anyway, if only the battles were fun. But they are most often not. Although genius in it's simplicity, the combat is still lacking. First thing that properly annoyed is that you select units AND give orders to them with the left mouse button which in turn had me repeatedly mistakenly miss to select unit and move the currently selected unit instead. Even though there is some unit variety, although not much, it's sad that you will need to use swordsman (your first unit) most of the time because of his taunt ability and of course the healer. There are some other units that can immobilize the enemy, but none of them can compare to swordsman's taunt, especially in boss fights since disables except taunt last shorter. Some of the boss fights all come down to taunting them, then moving your swordsman around while your range units poke him, then do the same again and again. That and similar "tactics" such taunting with two swordsman, making the boss switch between them while you heal your wounded swordsman makes fights more tedious than fun. And you absolutely need some form of crowd control since the enemies move at random to your squishy units and can kill them in one or two blows. And once one or two die, you might as well restart. Although the game seems to be stable, there are a few bugs with taunt, that cost me a few games, namely taunt sometimes doesn't work, especially when the target was rooted just before the taunt, meaning bosses on which root doesn't last long, simply continue to your back rows and kill multiple units with an aoe attack. With a small battlefield and your slow moving units there is simply no way to save them from being crushed in one or two attacks. In short: Good concept, not so good execution, with battles being more tedious to fight then challenging and fun. Also the priest's voice is bloody annoying.

Buy for the tutorial, stay for the game. The game narration is all ironic parody but the game is solid tactical real time strategy.

Ah finally! After so many years it finally surfaces on Steam! Played it years ago, it was a quite fun Pause-based real time squad based strategy game.

this game is simply not very good. looks like something from 90s. controls are barely adequate. difficulty level is eclectic. the whole game mimics a flash game of the same genre, a lot of which are better than this one. unless you're really into this gametype and have to play each and every one, not worth it.

Amusing, 4th wall-breaking narration and game is fun too. You unlock character classes and abilities for them that are very inspired by MMOs (e.g. the first 3 you get are a tank, a ranged attacker and a healer). it can be hard to select units sometimes but there is pause. I forgot about the pause...

Although I don't usually like games like this for some reason I am extremely enjoying Kingdom Elemental. The simplistic gameplay combined with the amount of available units/classes to use creates a very simplistic but deep gameplay. Extremely enjoyable, even if it is an outdated game. Well worth the money.

This game is basically a button app that says, "Is that your face, or did your neck throw up?" I don't really want to recommend it. It's goofy, it's clunky, it's easy to override your orders and ruin everything. It looks like a PSX game got hit in the face with a shovel. The characters repeat the same lines over, and over, and over again. A lot of them also have abysmal or infuriating voice acting. The difficulty spikes are ridiculous. Click detection is poor at best for many skills. Everything draws either way too much, or way too little threat. It's fiddly, janky, and irritating. It gets unfairly hard, unfairly quickly. Every time I see this game in my library I say, "Wait, what the hell is 'Kingdom Elemental'? I've obviously played it before, but I can't remember it at all." And then I boot it up to check. And I play for a solid stint. And I have quite a lot of fun. This game is a perfect train wreck.

Extremely bad real time strategy combat without building. You set up your troop before each round and fight preset enemies on a fixed screen. The control is left click for everything and the ai for enemy and your units is abyssimal...

Anyone who finds this game funny lacks a sense of humor; 4th walls be damned, "Damn it Tony." is not an ammusing loading screen tip. The gamepay is shallow too. It's very clear now why there aren't many SC2 maps coming out; all these devs just grab cash from people who don't know what games are. Go play Something Something Boss Battles in the SC2 acrade, it's free and better.