Kingdom Elemental
May 19, 2007 by tgoodfellow
Kingdom Elemental looks like a tactical combat game in a fantasy setting. You fight your way through round after round of bad guys with soldiers you buy with a pile of gold. Win a battle and you can unlock new powers and new soldiers. I say “looks like” because it really isn’t a fantasy tactical combat game; it’s a puzzle game with a hack and slash theme.
Why a puzzle game? Because the trick to winning a round isn’t efficient use of the troops you buy. Winning is almost entirely dependent on buying the correct troops to begin with. When the rounds begin to have enemies appear behind you or drop from the ceiling, any illusion that this title is about having a sound strategy go out the window. You fail, you learn the “map”, and then you solve the puzzle. Add a healer to a bunch of meat shields and you’ll cruise through the first couple of chapters. After that, it’s trial and error.
This doesn’t make Kingdom Elemental a bad game, only an incomplete one. In many ways, it feels like it should it be attached to something else. Maybe a grand strategy game or some adventure RPG. It’s a simple enough battle game that it would actually work pretty well in that sort of setup, but it’s not clear how much attention it merits standing on its own. The campaign is simply battle after battle linked by some sort of fantasy story. One should never review the game that wasn’t made, but I wonder if the skirmish game shouldn’t have been the main focus, with arena combat, gold and weapons upgrades.
On a technical level, the game is well done. You’ll get really sick of the cleric screaming “Inconceivable!” every time you click on him, but the narration of the chapter headings is appropriately over-the-top mock seriousness. Too bad this irreverence doesn’t bleed into the game itself. The variety of opponents and troops is nice, and the designers have done a good job differentiating the roles your units play in the battles. Kingdom Elemental is one of those games that has enough promise to be worth a look at the demo but will strongly appeal to only a small cross-section of fantasy/strategy/indie fans. It demonstrates enough skill to make you look forward to Liberation Software’s next game but not enough to give it a strong recommendation.
I honestly don’t agree with the “puzzle game” relation, as I would venture to say that every game out there has its times of trial and error. You die, repeat, but make the required changes to win. Kingdom Elemental is a nice little Indie game though.
I think it is a puzzle game too. I mean, if we are going with this way of thinking, Starcraft is a puzzle game. Half-Life is a puzzle game. Hell, chess is a puzzle game. I mean why not? If doing the correct sequence of events is what dictates something to be a ‘puzzle game’ then I think we should remove all genres and just replace them with “puzzle.” It makes perfect sense.
It’s not like in Kingdom Elemental there are a whole slew of units that can be combined to win the round, we all know you have choose the exact ones the developer had in mind. That’s why the developer chose to give the user a choice in what they can pick. Spanning an almost unlimited combination of units, so they can ultimately pick just one combo - rendering all the other options completely useless. Here again, this is a very accurate line of reasoning.
“Starcraft is a puzzle game. Half-Life is a puzzle game. Hell, chess is a puzzle game. I mean why not?”
Because in those games, there is generally more than a few correct options and ways to get to the “end”. Puzzle games aren’t just about doing things in the “correct sequence of events”, they are pretty much only about that.
Certainly most games have puzzle elements - things you need to solve. What weakens this boss? What is the counter to this unit? How do I get the elf to stand in the honeycomb? And this isn’t a bad thing. I like puzzles.
Ideally, a strategy game shouldn’t rely so extensively on trial and error. The first time you encounter many enemies in KE, you often have little clue as to what they can do or what the counter is. So you have to go back, spend money differently and try again. And again. Then you find the magic solution and move forward, often with minimal management beyond spamming spells or healing.
You can make the case that this isn’t that different from RTS story campaigns, and I’d probably agree with you to some extent - some RTS campaigns use puzzles more than others, especially in the old days. And if the skirmish mode here were better or the adventure mode more compelling, I could easily have given KE another star.
And there’s a lot to like here. I look forward to their next game. This one just didn’t grab me as much as I had hoped. There’s a lot of talent on display here. I just wanted a *little* more meat.
What’s amazing though is that it is developed by one man.