A New World: Kingdoms Reviews

I bought this game because it looked kinda neat but honestly, every mechanic of this game is in Civilization already and it's done better there. Stuff I liked about the game: -The 3D effect of the raised hexagons is really neat and I wished they'd do this in Civilization too. Stuff I didn't like in this game: -The ability to move around the map with the mouse (or even just turn the map) was missing -There was no explanation of what icons mean (no hover-text in this game except for the building list for the workers) -Every time you click a worker or a warrior they answer with "Yes?" which gets annoying real fast.

This game is ok. It doesn't have much depth though, which the style and gameplay it's using makes feel unfulfilling to me. If you really enjoy the early early game of Civ, then you'd probably enjoy it. It's a very fast playing version of that. Limited map size, limited unit options, simplified combat. If those don't sound like bad things to you, then go for it. If you want depth, probably look elsewhere. I can't recommend it, but I have... a few hours in Civ Games, so take that as you will.

A New World: Kingdoms is a 4X game that has some gamebreaking issues. *Updated for patch 1.2 You can find a about 13 minutes of gameplay with commentary here: [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGZ5wMQly5M] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGZ5wMQly5M [/url] [h1]-- Please note this vid was based on the release build and it seems the bugs I mentioned have been resolved. The AI still needs work. --[/h1] The story of this game is a bit thin, the information on the steam page is basically the whole game story. You control a Kingdom, with the goal to wipe out the opposing Kingdom. You can do this by either destroying the AI's main city, or by purchasing it for large amount of resources. This gives you the choice of concentrating on building your empire to gain resources quickly or raising an army... at least that appears to have been the idea. To start with the good - I like the graphic style. The low poly environment is nice and appears to be based on the same design of the last game this developer created. The game music sits nicely in the background, as does the ambient sounds. The units have a limited range of things to say and you will hear the same line over and over, but it was a good addition if the alternative was nothing. That's where it ends. I ran into repeated bugs which stopped the game turns from progressing. I would start a game, take my first turn and that was it. Quitting and restarting the game resulted in the same issue. After 5 restarts where the game wouldn't move past the 1st turn, I had to quit the program and restart it before it would move onto turn 2. Even then, the same thing occurred at about turn 5. As I type this the game is downloading an update that should resolve this issue.[h1] -- This was resolved with Patch 1.1.[/h1] The blur option in the graphics that blurs out the map screen when you are in a menu is problematic. I found that if I started a game with this option enabled, everything would be blurred - always. I had to go into the options, disable and re-enable it to get the game running correctly. Eventually I just disabled the option, as on game restarts it would return.[h1] -- This was resolved with patch 1.2.[/h1] The AI itself is a potato. In the few games that would keep going, the AI did nothing. It produced no units and didn't defend when I attacked. In the game I have linked above, it produced 1 unit in 19 turns - enough to delay the destruction of its city for 1 turn. I found no way to increase the difficulty of the game, so I have to assume that's as good as the AI gets. As someone who has not played 4X games in years, a tutorial would have been a good addition. The first dev video on steam appears to have a tutorial message, but I did not see an option to launch it in the game. I bought the game based on the graphics and because it had been so long since I played a 4X style of game. Unfortunately I was frustrated from the start as I had no idea what I was supposed to do, so it took me a few minutes of clicking to figure things out. It didn't help that I hit the turn bug which made me wonder what I had missed.[h1] -- The tutorial section has been made clear with patch 1.2.[/h1] At the time of posting this, I cant recommend this game. Thankfully the turn bug has been resolved, and I expect the blur issue will be sorted quickly as well. But until the AI is improved, the game just offers no challenge. Hopefully the Devs can sort this out as well.