A Kingdom For Keflings XBLA Review
Black & White lite?
by TWODOGSz
©Aaron Bertinetti
With the launch of the New Xbox Experience (“NXE”) came a lot of excitement, some derision, and a whole bunch of freaks, geeks and celebrities on my friends list. Riding on the coat tails of Microsoft’s largely successful console relaunch is Kingdom For Keflings, the first XBLA title to have full Avatar integration, from the strategically minded developers Ninja Bee (Band of Bugs, Outpost Kaloki and Cloning Clyde).
From the title screen it’s pretty clear the audience the developers are targeting. Relaxing, uplifting music; pleasant, colourful visuals; and a simple premise to draw that audience in.
In a sentence this game is Warcraft without War.
An RTS where resource management and construction are not a means to an end, but are indeed an end in itself. Kingdom For Keflings is odd in that it’s the first game I can recall playing on XBLA where success is not achieved by scaling adversity. Sure you collect things, and you build things, and you order Kef-things… but nothing ever threatens your progress. There may be a Kingdom For Keflings, but there’s no Kingdom For Badlings.
Gameplay is as simple as it comes. You control your Avatar or some other pre determined caricature if you want to skip the game’s key marketing point. With your Avatar in hipsters, flannels, tight leather or perhaps just straight drag, you control and manipulate a population of Keflings. What are Keflings? Tiny little people in cute ye olde English dress up which whilst the size of ants cannot be squashed by your Avatar’s (deliberately) clumsy feet. You can, however, kick them for giggles!
Much in the vein of Populus or Molyneux’s later godly masterpiece, Black and White, you are a god both as your avatar and as god of the game.
The core of the game can be divided into three core areas; people management, resource management; and city management. People management includes training and education, reproduction, and employment (collecting, crafting, administration). Resource management includes collecting, storing and refining resources for production.
City management involves the construction of various buildings, using blueprints and components, to propel all three core management areas forward into more advanced iterations and missions (thanks guvnor!). If gameplay sounds dry, that’s because it largely is.
And whilst the game does its best to add gameplay quirks and flashes, such as allowing an Avatar to collect resources to speed up production or dividing buildings into components to be assembled, the reality is most additions are superficial and add little to core gameplay.
But that’s not to be overtly critical of the gameplay Ninja Bee presents, it’s just that if you’re going to spend 800 points on a title, you should know there’s nothing particularly new here in terms of gameplay design.
Where Keflings distinguishes itself over other strategic offerings on XBLA is in its abundance of character and charm.
There’s a very tangible whimsy to the whole experience that keeps you interested well beyond the core mechanics. In fact when played in short bursts or with friends online, when time prevents the repetitive gameplay from becoming all too apparent, there’s an entrancing-like hook that’ll pull you back in to build one more castle or village.
And it’s pretty damn cool to actually be playing a game with your own and other’s Avatars running about, rather than simply seeing them sit around on your new shiny dashboard.
All this makes the title perfect for its apparent target market. The pick up and play casual audience, the family games room, and the open minded hardcore looking to “kill” an hour between sessions of Gears 2, will like what they find. It’s chilled out, laid back and never threatens to overwhelm you. And whilst slowdown is an occasionally embarrassing issue, the game looks pretty to boot.
Yet even though I recognise the game’s objectives and “reason for being” I can’t help but feel the title is a missed opportunity.
Perhaps Ninja Bee intends to expand the title further in the future, but the opportunity for story based campaigns, expanded and adversarial multiplayer, and taking the concept of building components to the more next gen concept of user generated buildings (much like the vehicle parts in Banjo & Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts), feels missed.
As it is, Kingdom For Keflings is a charming diversion with casual gameplay, charming quirks and an open ended, non-threatening premise. It’s also an effective showcase of the potential of Avatar based games.
It’s just a shame it’s nothing more.
”7.5/10
©Aaron Bertinetti
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