A Kingdom For Keflings - Review
Added December 17th, 2008 by Artie Augustyn
Ever since Sim City was released in 1989, an entire genre spawned that I like to refer to as “Chill games.” These types of games are designed specifically to get you, the player, to sit down and relax. After a close match in Gears of War 2 or an intense sequence from Fallout 3, everyone needs time to wind down. While most of these games succeed at being relaxing, they usually fail at being fun. Enter A Kingdom for Keflings, a “chill” that that if it fits your style you’ll be playing for hours, and if not, you’ll have trouble bearing the first five minutes.
You play as a giant in an undisclosed land, aiding humanoid characters called Keflings. The point of the game is to help the Keflings’ town grow. In order to do this you’ll manage the Keflings’ resource gathering and base building. The gameplay is similar to an RTS or Sim City game, but without having to worry about long-term problems such as attacking another nation or balancing your economy. You’ll need resources to make new buildings. New buildings give you new resources, which in turn give you new buildings, which give you new resources, and then a castle fits in somewhere.
It sounds simple, but it’s mind-numbingly tedious. Keflings can collect wood, stone, and wool in order to progress your town’s tech tree, but only a set amount of Keflings are allowed into the town at any given time. Unlike an RTS, you can’t just churn out five hundred Keflings and gobble up every resource available. As you progress through the tech-tree more Keflings are awarded to you. So the only real difficulty the game has is managing the few numbers of workers provided. The entire game feels like you never have the required amount of people to accomplish the tasks. It’s as if you’re being limited in an unfair way.
As the game continues, things only become worse. The higher tech levels require more refined levels of resources. For instance, some buildings require “carved wood.” So you’ll need one Kefling to cut wood from the trees, one Kefling to move the wood from the trees to the lumber mill. Another Kefling designated to transporting the wooden planks from the mill to the refined lumber mill, and finally another Kefling needs to carry the carved wood from the refined lumber mill to the factory. This twenty-minute process gives you a single unit of carved wood, when you need 150 in total. It’s ridiculous!
Despite the dull design and terrible frame rate, I found myself playing KFK for five hours straight. The entire game I felt “This isn’t very fun, I wish I wasn’t playing this” but continued to do so anyway. The game does have a very successful guilty-pleasure addictive nature to it, so there’s obviously something about the game that makes it fun, or at least, a good way to waste time. Perhaps KFK would’ve been better off as a portable game instead of an Xbox Live Arcade release. Regardless, there’s an obvious niche for this game. If you try out the demo and enjoy it, go ahead and buy the final product. If you struggled through the beginning the same way I did, it’s best to stay away.
