My Favourite Couch Co-op - Kingdom: Two Crowns

Build, expand, defend. 

Confession - I wrote this for the Week 3 post-task assignment but it got sort of longish so I’m putting it up here. If a one- or two-player chill resource-management strategy game with beautiful pixel graphics and nice sound design sounds good to you, I recommend you skip this ‘review’/narrative analysis, just pick this game up and don’t read too much about it. The fun part of the game is finding new things and discovering what they are. Be warned though, there's some bugs.

Thinking about this now, if you’re not interested in such a game, then this write up probably doesn't do much for you either. So, uh... read on if you’re intrigued but too poor to buy games. Or you're Chris and it's like, your job. Hi!

Kingdom: Two Crowns (2018) developed by Thomas van den Berg and Coatsink is a game where you’re the Monarch of your own empire and travel from island to island, building forts and expanding your kingdom while battling monsters. The game is continuation to the games Kingdom (2015) and Kingdom: New Lands (2016).

The game is extremely 2D – your character – or rather, your steed -  can walk or run left or right. You are a royal, anyway, and a royal doesn’t walk around and they certainly don’t jump.

Except when riding on Prongs. Bounce for your life my child!!

On an island - which there are five of – you expand your empire outwards, with the heart of your operations, the campfire and the castle, always in the middle of the island. On the other end there’s a monster cave, on the other a harbour. Every island has multiple camps where peasants spawn – you recruit them by dropping coins on the ground, their rags magically transform into people-clothes and they walk into the city to labour away for your cause. 

Buildings spring up and you spend coin on tools, and the peasants become builders, archers, spearmen, knights and farmers. You get coins from different operations your workers do, to recruit more workers to build more buildings and make more money. You slowly build an army powerful enough to defeat the monster portals and the cave of the monsters on the far side of the island, while also defending your fort against the nightly attacks and keeping your economy in shape. That's basically it.

You also throw money at repairs of your wrecked ship, to expand to a different island – to maybe find diamonds, or unlock better technologies.  

The amount of money you have is always uncertain, because the coins are held in a pouch by ‘gravity’. Often you’ll run through workers throwing money at you and the bag overflows, and money drops into the river. I think it's a fun mechanic.

The player character is randomised in the beginning, and can be either a King or Queen of varying skin colours and wardrobes. One other character in the game is The Ghost; a past ruler who acts as a floating tutorial and gives you financial advice that you didn’t ask for. All of the villagers are basically faceless, stocky dudes without much personality – so there’s plenty of room for imagination. 

The narrative of the game is of a ruthless leader who travels from island to island killing the native population, destroying the forests and killing wild animals. If we assume that the monsters are evil by nature – and they do attack without cause other than their island being settled by others, so fair enough – then it’s a story of a power hungry leader throwing countless soldiers at a pointless war against monsters. The game does say, after the monsters are killed, that the ‘kingdom is saved’ - but there’s no reason to expand on any further islands after you’ve managed to kill all the monsters on one! Except maybe, destiny... and curiosity and boredom, of course. The game must go on, after all! 

Come at me bro

Alright, mostly kidding. So the monsters - called Greed - are obviously alien and evil; you want money for nice shit like griffons and unicorns and they want to take it so they must be destroyed. 

And no reason to feel bad for the soldiers either – your troops don’t really die; the monsters just steal their coins and tools, reverting them back to peasants that you have to spend money to equip again. The monsters might kidnap your dog but if you blow up their cave you’ll get her back.  

The game is quite casual, which is why I like it. It’s beautiful to look at and sounds nice. If you lose, if your crown gets stolen, it’s nearly always because you overreached or fucked up somehow – you attacked a portal too near to sunset, you ran too far from the safety of your walls, you accidentally built a fence in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes though the Red Moon brings an ungodly army of evil at your doorstep, your defences just break down completely and your game is completely screwed. So it helps to have a friend!

Could you run and collect the peasants, dear? It's getting late.

The most (and many argue, only) noteworthy feature in this game compared to the previous one is local co-op. The game's the same, whether you play it by yourself or together; you can share tasks and explore different directions, but you're on the same island, building the same Kingdom. If the other person wants to go out and party, they can just leave their character standing around in the fort or exit the game and the other can continue he same game by themselves.

The game's lovely and all, but one obvious con that has to be mentioned is that some frustrating bugs remain after almost a year from launch. Some are just mildly annoying, like NPC's acting slightly weird - I'm not sure if the way The Ghost keeps nagging me about saving my money is a bug or a feature - but some are honestly game-breaking. I've had the save file get corrupted twice, losing hours of gameplay. I'm not one to really care and I'm happy to start again, but I understand how someone might be annoyed. That really ought to get fixed.

Also, because the game doesn't really help you all that much, on a first play-through you can easily fuck up your game, when things you haven't known to prepare for take you by surprise. Case in point: winter! At the beginning, the easiest way to get money is to train archers to hunt rabbits, which disappear in the winter. The game has a rotation of four equally long seasons, so if you end up having no income at all, it's a really long and boring time to sit around and wait for the spring to come.

My favourite part of the game are the different steeds. My favourite is the lizard. It's the awesomest.

Burn, motherfucker! Burn!

Images lifted from the game's Steam page, copyrights belong to the makers of the game.