April 7, 2009 - In a world where hyper-violent combat, overwrought storytelling and competitive online multiplayer seems to rule the world it’s almost jarring to have games like Kingdom for Keflings come along. Oh sure, it isn’t the first game released that attempts to sit in a place that would be comfortable to both hardcore and more casual gamers but it’s one of the few to do so successfully. Indeed when playing this game you run the very real risk of losing several hours to this simple yet addicting experience.

The plot for Kingdom for Keflings is kind of silly; you are a giant (you can use either one of four pre-made ones or, for Xbox Live players, your Avatar) who must help out the little people, known as Keflings, to build a kingdom. That’s about all there is to it, there is no story beyond this simple premise to get in the way of playing the game. What you get instead is guidelines of things you should do (i.e. Build this house, work on a keep, etc) and you can receive quests from the Mayor which give you rewards for completion. All of this helps to give the game a bit more focus than just “build willy-nilly” which is appreciated.

As the giant you are going to be doing pretty much all of the heavy lifting. While the Keflings can harvest and move resources they can only move one unit at a time while you can move carry ten or more. The main purpose of the little guys is to do the labor you can’t do. This ranges from running the buildings (some buildings require a dedicated Kefling to be put inside for it to work), helping you to move supplies and, their biggest use, harvest the resources. While you can carry more than them you can’t really harvest much faster than they can which means your time is better spent doing other things while they harvest.

Unlike in most games of this type you don’t build the structures wholesale. There are a number of workshops where you will build different sub-structures, like sitting rooms, stairs or guard towers, and then have to place them in a configuration to get the building to spawn in. While it starts out a bit cumbersome and makes you wish for the more simplified building found in RTS games it quickly becomes second nature.

Much of this game is streamlined in such a way that it seems to go out of its way to ensure you don’t get annoyed with it. One of the annoyances about this game is that each workshop has its own supplies. So if you have 200 logs of wood it might be spread out in 4 buildings instead of in one common pool. But since your resources can never run out that is hardly an issue, just wait a bit and harvest more trees.

Another nuisance is that there are several “levels” to each type of resource. So some buildings might need wood logs, others need wood planks while yet others require carved wood. This would be a serious pain if not for the ability to pull resources out of one workshop in pallets and move them to other shops or the buildings that refine the resource. So even though you don’t have a communal pool of things you’re always able to shuffle resources to the buildings that they’re needed to be in. This allows you to leisure of not really worrying about how resources are harvested or what building they are brought to.

Oh sure, some of the textures aren’t very good and the sound is repetitive enough to make you violate your eardrums with a screwdriver but it works just fine. The giants, Keflings and buildings all look good enough that you can ignore how bland the actual backgrounds and trees look. This isn’t all that important though since this is an online title and it’s very clear that the bulk of the work went into making a game that was fun and easy to play, which Kingdom of Keflings succeeds at. You can easily have more fun with this game than some of the full priced titles on the market.

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