Wednesday 7 November 2012

Little Kingdom Advanced (XBLIG) Review


 Little Kingdom Advanced is available now on the XBLIG Marketplace for 80MSP.

Little Kingdom is a 'peaceful land without war or battle'. The objective of the game (although not immediately apparent due to a HUGE lack of tutorial) is to overcome everyone else on the board and take over the land. From what I could grasp of the game you do this by placing towers EVERYWHERE to have influence over more land. After reading up on this game online I found that you can upgrade buildings to increase your range, but the game never made this particularly clear.
I'll be honest, I was pretty excited about this game. I love games like Risk Civilization and have recently downloaded Carcassonne to try my hand at. In my mind this game was in the same genre as these, which meant that I should have loved it.
I didn't. In fact I kind of hated it. On opening the game, I did find it appealing. The art style is quite cute, and the menu graphics are pretty good. The music is alright, not teeth-grindingly annoying like some games.
Then it all fell apart on starting the game. You're thrown straight into the game where the AI is already way ahead of you placing zillions of towers. After getting to grips with how to do this, I immediately started placing towers everywhere too. Then I ran out of money. Awesome. There is a price increase with every tower placed.
After about five minutes of placing towers I was starting to get annoyed. The game seemed nowhere near ending, every step ahead I got in the next minute the AI would leave me in it's dust. The AI is incessant in this game. It is the most competitive AI I have ever met!
By this point I was bored and seriously cursing whoever decided to not put a tutorial in. It's annoying. I don't need everything spoon fed to me but basics would be good.
The game lacks purpose, direction and above all a fun-factor. It drags on and on and even when playing with my friends locally (there is no online support) it just wasn't fun. In my opinion this game is a definite miss.
2/10 SKIP IT!
A code was provided for the purpose of this review.

1 comment:

  1. Yeah, I played this game too. I agree that the lack of tutorial is frustrating. But the problem I had was that I figured out the objective pretty quickly... and just didn't find it very engaging. I guess I felt like all my options were laid at before me from the beginning.

    I don't know. I guess I wanted there to be more to the game.

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