Kingdom Incremental

One of the most unclear tutorials I have ever seen,. It tells you what to do but doesn't tell you how much of it you are supposed to do. Right now I'm on expanding my territory and I have unlocked about 20 zones and it's still not progressing. Is it broken? Is there a certain amount I'm supposed to hit? Is there a certain area I'm supposed to unlock? Why is it not progressing? I feel like I am stuck in the same spot with no end in sight. I just want to get through the tutorial and play. The issue is it's not particularly intuitive so the tutorial would be helpful. I just want to learn the basics and then play not spend over an hour in the tutorial.

I want to like this game. I enjoyed it, mostly, for the first hour or so. Six hours in, however, there's literally NOTHING left for me to do. Let's start with the positive. The game looks pretty good, it has a satisfying "numbers go up" experience, and the ease of gathering the more premium currencies means nothing feels like it's locked away for too long. There are buildings you can use to generate the upgrade currency (gemeralds) and the prestige currency (crowns) so you can still get those upgrades if you prestiged just a little too soon to buy the thing you want. No microtransactions, and the ability to hide UI elements is a nice touch. The sense of exploration by uncovering tiles before you can expand feels neat, but the cost ramps up enough that it feels like you HAVE to prestige to do it more early on. Now, for the negatives. - I'm 6 hours into the game and I have literally nothing left to do. I've uncovered an entire map, have the hard cap of all currencies (gold, gemeralds, crowns) and all of my productions are net positive. All of my upgrades (gemerald and crown) are capped. I could prestige and do it all again faster, but I'm literally incapable of upgrading anything else. - The "storyline" is not my cup of tea. It hardly even feels like a storyline, so maybe the real complaint is about the dialogue. The steward who acts as the tutorial/hint giver is snarky in a way that reminds me of how I spoke in my angsty high schooler phase, and the letters feel like they've been thrown together in a way to just make it apparent there's a chance of getting a boon when you respond. - The letters, since we're talking about them, are boring and overwhelming at the same time. As you play, you'll receive "letters" that are in fact conversations with people rather than correspondence. A peasant wants to wear your crown! A goose approaches you and might give you a time skip. A goblin wants to eat your citizens. Another peasant wants a hug. A wizard offers you a permanent (for this prestige) upgrade to resource generation for your lowest tier generators. The dev wants feedback. You get a gift of a bunch of gold. That's all there is, but with upgrades you can let up to like, 30 of them stack. There's no real benefit to any of them because your fast-forward and easily available gemerald-bought time skips far exceed any benefit the letters can provide. - Performance is okay at best. It plays fine when you're idling and I ran into very few items when building, but when upgrading a lot of buildings by a lot of levels at the same time, or assigning citizens to work in those buildings, the game would hang for up to a minute at a time. Assigning "max" citizens to something is actually capped, to only assign around a thousand at a time, so you have to hold the button down or click the slider which causes the lag. - The lack of content means there's just nothing to hold your attention after a while. Every prestige became a rush to get the crown and gemerald generators up, and then wait. Once you get enough gemeralds, you open your prestige page, and keep doubling your crown reward until it hits the cap (which feels inconsistent -- I was first stopped at 32 trillion crowns, then later it was in the undecillions, now it's all finally stuck at 179 AA for everything) and then you do it all again. - Some of the content just doesn't work. You can build a church and assign citizens, and they're supposed to sell clothes you've made for gold. No matter how many I assigned, they generated 0 gold. Considering you need gold to expand and your other source of making money is by taxing your buildings, it hurt to have something just not work. Further, for 90% of the game, I couldn't access anything other than tier 1 research for taxation. I would change tabs away from research and then go back, and everything would be hidden, so I could only automate taxation of the lowest gold generator, which meant I would never get enough money to expand unless I manually clicked the highest ones every few hours. - Autobuild is dumb. I don't mean it's a silly feature that shouldn't be there, I mean "I clicked it once and it replaced everything I had built with roads." Then it wasted all of my money on upgrading those roads, and I couldn't turn it off. I had to prestige so I could rebuild my moderately well planned city. - There's no incentive to build an attractive settlement. Even when taking into account the "neighbor bonus" I ultimately just ended up dropping blocks of 100 of a building together wherever I could fit them. - I paid almost $10 for this. Yeah, I know, it's early access and more stuff is probably coming later on and it's always a gamble when you pay for a game before reviews and updates come in, but I LIKE being a part of the early access process. It's nice to be able to provide feedback and see a game shaped from the start. That said, I've gotten infinitely more content and active play out of free mobile games. This absolutely feels like it should have been a free, community-building alpha, rather than a paid product on Steam. It's not ready by any stretch, and I regret spending money on it.

After waiting a good amount of time for change or updates, I feel as though this game will see no progress. We've been given a roadmap of changes and ideas to be implemented, but no real time line. There are no updates on Steam (there may be more elsewhere, but the roadmap pinned has not changed in months) and it feels as though this game is just overwhelmingly broken for the developer. It is a great idea for a game, incremental with little tasks that aren't too overwhelming. However, there isn't much of a tutorial and when you get further into the purchasing, there are more questions than there are answers that the tutorial left you unprepared for. For the price it is, it is not worth the purchase in its current state. YES-this game is early access. YES-things may change and become more smooth for game play and understanding of the basic controls. HOWEVER-as it stands right now, it is just unplayable after a certain point which is not long after beginning the game. I hope to change this review after updates (if they should come)! Edit: As of the end of December, there has been no change. It's easier to just uninstall this game than hope for an update.

This should have been under a fiver, even less. Not worth the amount it is now, and I can't see how it ever will be. There are other reviews that detail specifically why the game isn't worth the current price far better than I can - read them and listen.

Game has game breaking bugs about 6 hours in. Is not worth the price. No developper response to bugs. Game should not be in the store.

I like how it tries some new things, and is quite different from other incremental games I've played. You should have a good tolerance for quirkiness and bugs though. For this game the early access label is quite correct, and it can benefit from a lot of fixes and improvements (which I've given as a long list already to the developer). In short the game is already fun, but buggy. Recommended if you can stomach bugs.

This is a fun relaxing game with a neat concept. I am excited to see it develop over time! :) I love the new quality of life improvements recently added to the game!

Lack of Content is the only bad thing about the game right now, a few minor visual bugs but besides that its a good game with alot of potential with new updates.

I'm all for paying upfront for incrementals, but this one is very broken and hasn't seen any updates or communication since a roadmap was pinned months ago.

GREAT START TO AN EARLY ACCESS GAME. WOULD RECOMMEND.