A Kingdom for Keflings Review

cover art

     Hello everyone and happy Wednesday, hope your all doing great.  I was browsing through the Steam store and saw that the new Civilization came out recently.  For those of you who don't know Sid Meier's Civilization is a game of growing your small settlement out of the stone age and into the future of man, which during the course of the evolution stage, you are seemingly an  immortal dictator that everyone follow without question.  Although I am fond of Civilization, when I saw it on Steam, I thought of Kingdom for Kefllings for some reason.  I played this game long ago in the long past year of 2009 before I discovered Civilization.  Basically a more basic version of Civilization with more direct interaction.  A Kingdom for Keflings was released for Xbox Arcade and then the following year on PC.  Mainly focusing on the Xbox side of the story, it uses the player's Microsoft avatar as the interactive sage you will be.  The game starts with a small pile of resources and you, a 20ft tall giant that will help and physically aid the Keflings into growing their society into a thriving middle ages city where everyone is happy and content, so basically the opposite of the middle ages. The Keflings are small elf-like people who you guild, in order to do this, you will set them to work chopping down trees for wood, which are then processed into boards which can then be made into houses.  The same can be said for stone, which can be mined for ore or made into stone blocks used to build walls and castles.

a town in the process of growing

Mills are built to create wood products, forges to create things from rock, weaving shops to process wool into cloth and some weird shop that process crystals for whatever reason.  Houses are built to upgrade the Kefling population, they can then be upgraded into manors. Schools can be built to teach certain skills to the Keflings, then you can send them to college.  The work force being educated in the middle ages, what is going on here? While the Keflings gather most of the supplies while taking them to and from locations to be made usable, the player creates the buildings and to upgrade them once the proper materials and blueprints are at hand.  Tools that the Keflings can be discovered by gathering a glowing resource, be it tree, ore or crystal, which are seen rarely.  There are also player upgrades to be discovered through doing the same action, these allow you to gather resources more efficiently and walk faster.  While the last one may sound stupid, it funny how slow you move when carrying 10 tons of wood to your village that is a few miles away.  One thing that bored me was that there is no wildlife or other creatures that threaten your society, so their is no danger or consequences for your choices. As with any world building game, there is a large sense of satisfaction at starting with some twigs and turning it into thriving city. There are more features to be held within this game but since its been four years since I picked it up, I will leave you with the good memorable bits.  Would recommend, though the music does tend to drive one insane after awhile, still fun though.  I hope you all enjoyed and I will be back next week with more reviews.  This has been Jacob Arnold, signing off.

 must watch in highest setting to be visible