Total War Battles: Kingdom (BETA)

Kingdom is a tablet based spin-off title of the Total War series. It’s also available on Steam where its currently in open beta. It’s a free to play title so I thought I’d give it a go. This isn’t the first time TW has dabbled with a mobile/tablet variation, but Kingdom is quite a step up from Battles: Shogun (2012) in terms of content and mechanics. Rather than focusing purely on combat, Kingdom is more about castle and land construction. It also has its own battle system, plus various missions and ‘quests’ to undertake.

I’ve seen Kingdom get a lot of hate on Steam, partly because it's a tablet game which many don’t want to see on the platform (and I’d agree to an extent) but it’s also not really fair on Kingdom, which as far as a tablet based game goes, is actually very polished and surprisingly decent. I don’t see the point of hating it simply for what it is – a ‘casual’ tablet based Total War spin-off.

Despite sharing the Total War name, Kingdom is a very different sort of game. You begin with a single castle keep in a small region of medieval England. From here, you can reshape the land to a limited degree – raising and lowering the land, for example – and then build up a custom town around your keep of homes, churches, taverns, blacksmiths and various types of barracks for your army. You can build walls around your town, roads to connect to new towns you’ll establish, bridges across rivers and dams to prevent flooding.

Of course, all of this building and land reshaping costs resources – food, stone, silver and wood. Some can be gathered on the map from resource ‘stashes’ – piles of dead wood, for example – but these are exhausted fairly quickly. So you’ll need to construct resource producing buildings. It’s a fairly simple system – a farm harvests food, a quarry mines stone, a blacksmith produces silver etc. And some buildings, such as blacksmiths or taverns, require workers and artisans which are generated over time by your keep. Harvesting the other resources also takes time, typically about 8 minutes for a single node of say, wood or food. You can set your buildings to harvest multiple nodes at once but this can extend the collection time to 8 hours or so.

And that’s the thing with Kingdom – it’s the sort of game designed to be played in short 5-15 minute bursts, where you’ll set your buildings to harvest, engage in some battles, then come back and collect. Or, if you’re not going to be playing for an extended period – set it to harvest a large area overnight. The system works quite well if you play it in the way its intended – as a game on the go. Which is also why it doesn’t quite feel right on PC.

Of course, you can instantly collect resources for a cost of Gold. Gold can be earned through missions/quests or (rarely) found in the game world, but if you want a lot of it you’ll need to purchase it. This is the microtransactional aspect of Kingdom – offering various coffers of Gold for an increasingly high price. The thing is though, that in the (admittedly short – about 3 hours) time I spent with Kingdom, I never hit any point where I felt I needed to buy gold to progress. You’re granted a pretty generous starting amount and earn some more as you level up.

As long as you’re not too impatient, collecting resources really isn’t that bad – if you play in short bursts rather than sitting waiting for timers to count down. In only 3 hours of play I reached level 12 and built up a nice little town with a solid army – and zero gold bought. In fact, I had quite a bit left over. So as far as I’m concerned, in terms of a free to play tablet title with microtransactions, Kingdom is actually fairly generous compared to other stuff I’ve seen.

So do I hate it for not being a ‘proper’ Total War title? No, that would be silly. It’s not trying to be and shouldn’t be judged as such. Should I hate it for its microtransactions? From what I’ve played, I really can’t. But do I think Kingdom, as its own game, is worth my time? No. I don’t think Kingdom is a bad game in terms of a free to play tablet title, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s particularly good either.

My problem with Kingdom is that I was tired of it after only a handful of hours. Even playing in short bursts, the game lacks any real depth or challenge that doesn’t require either patience (to gather what resources you need) or tedious grinding (to level up your army). Within three hours I felt I’d seen everything the game had to offer and was already losing interest.

Building up your town is certainly fun for a short time, but you soon realise how limited the options are in terms of building types and placement. This is also an issue with the land reshaping. It’s very basic, and the resource cost of using it means you won’t be able to sculpt the land to any great degree. You can unlock and expand into new regions of the map over time and even build up multiple towns, but honestly, there’s no real incentive to bother. And that’s the thing, there’s no real long term reason to keep going. You gather resources so that you can build more buildings to gather more resources. And that’s about it.

So let’s talk about the battle system in Kingdom. Like the building aspect, it’s a solid but ultimately shallow feature. Battles are limited to a handful of troops on each side who basically just charge at one another. You can quickly rearrange your formation a little at the start of the fight and use a few special abilities, but it’s incredibly basic and lacks any real strategy aside from clicking on your units to get a ‘perfect’ charge. For a tablet user who doesn’t typically play strategy titles, it might be enjoyable for a time, but I think even they would soon lose interest. I really don’t see why the system couldn’t have been fleshed out with more units, tactics and features.

The other major problem with the battle system is how long it takes to upgrade your troops. You earn very little XP per fight, so to tackle tougher battles, you’ll have to tediously grind your way through dozens of easier ones. It grew rather tiresome very quickly. Oh, and if you’re wondering what the ‘mission/quest’ aspect I mentioned is all about, it’s really just different battles loosely strung together.

I don’t think Kingdom is terrible. As a tablet game it’s…fine, I guess. But it feels like it could have been a lot more though, and if they hadn’t gone the free to play/microtransaction route, I think it could have been a neat little castle/town building game. Charge a couple of bucks for it, remove the lengthy timers and just let people build and reshape the land without cost.

As it is, Kingdom is a fairly polished, pretty and competent title, but one without any real depth, challenge or reason to play beyond a few short hours. Maybe if I had a tablet I’d hop into it on occasion, but on PC it’s just not worth my time – I’d rather just play Attila.