I’m a civilization/strategy game junkie. The kind that picked up the Settlers of Catan card game just to see if it was even close to the genius of the original board game. It’s quite possible that I have unlimited patience, because I will unblinkingly devote hours and hours to resource gathering and construction, even if I know I’ll never see the fruits of battle. So while I was waiting for the beta of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War to download, I decided to give A Kingdom For Keflings a shot. I might have spent the next 6 hours on the game and forgotten about my download, but that’s not the point.

NinjaBee didn’t exactly make the game to end all games here, but it is good for a wee bit of fun (pun totally intended).

It’s an 800-point download on the XBOX Live Arcade. That means it’ll set you back 10 bucks — not too shabby.

Bonus throwback moment: it occurred to me that A Kingdom For Keflings is like a shiny new version of a game I played until the disc didn’t work anymore called Serf City: Life is Feudal. There’s just something very satisfying about lording over a village of wee, medieval-ish people who like to build stuff.

Remember that XBOX Live avatar you made when NXE debuted? You get to use it in this game, in Gulliver form. I’m a fan, because while I enjoy lording over my strategy-game minions as an unseen omnipotent force, it’s even cooler when it’s me lording over my minions. In a sundress and yellow heels.

Standard sim/civ protocol follows — collect resources, use resources to make buildings, get upgrades, lather, rinse, repeat. Oh yeah, and you can punt the Keflings.

Cutesy medieval strategy games have evolved since the days of Serf City, and the little Keflings are fairly advanced. Well, for minions, at least. Not only do they happily harvest wood, rocks, crystals, and wool, but they can be trained to transport it to the location of your choosing. In addition to gathering and transporting, the Keflings can be educated and trained to do a variety of jobs. One lucky dude gets to be the Mayor/Lord/King (appropriately enough, he gets the job before the school is built, so the Keflings’ representative leader is the least educated of the entire population).

Keflings themselves are the scarcest resource. Once you start to slot them into artisan jobs, you’ll notice that your supply of human capital is dwindling fast. In order to breed more peons, you need to find the elusive Love. How a propos.

Obviously, there are buildings. The game follows a pretty standard system of requiring certain basic structures before upgrades appear (I mean, really, would you invest that much time in a game where you could build the Big Important Castle at the beginning?). Resources are used to make these buildings, sometimes in simple raw form (logs, rocks, crystals, wool), and later in advanced (wood planks, cut stone, magic gems, cloth) and civilized (carved wood, brick, magic dust, silk) forms.

There’s a blueprint to unlock for every building in the game. Each building is comprised of several components, which may or may not be made in the same workshop (hint: keep your workshops easily accessible), and isn’t finished until all of the pieces are laid out according to the blueprint. Fair enough.

Whew! So there’s a lot going on for a simple, cartoony XLA game. Let’s break it down:

Obviously, I’m a fan of the integration of the XBOX Live avatar. The devs figured out how to make use of that thing without it being too cheesy. Plus, it’s kinda cute that the avatar is a giant.

The blueprint building system adds a second process beyond just gathering the right number of resources and clicking “go.” I like this, it keeps me interested and makes me pay attention instead of just mindlessly clicking. This is probably 75% of the reason I got sucked into the game.

Bonus for the architecturally-challenged: once you’ve laid down the first building tile, a little blue box shows up to tell you where the next piece goes.

Plus, there’s a little something for the world-creation geeks: the game actually encourages you to be creative with construction. Once you’ve played it once-through to unlock all of the blueprints (or given up before that, whatever), have a little fun with your kingdom layout. I’m a little bit in love with the game devs for suggesting things like making a maze for the Keflings or a football field.

The Keflings aren’t rocket scientists, they’re just minions, so if you don’t choose a location for resource drop-off or allocate the Keflings to new jobs, they’ll pull a Sorcerer’s Apprentice on you and just. keep. going. Check back later, and you’ll notice a pile of 300+ crystals in the middle of a field…great.

I haven’t run into any situations where I depleted any of the resources yet, but that’s just wasteful. I totally get that part of the strategy is to effectively manage the human (Kefling) capital, but I would love the ability to set limits on how much each Kefling mines.

Multiplayer gameplay is…kind of blah. There aren’t many built-in features to make this mode easier, and there just aren’t many multiplayer-specific features in general. One thing I was totally wishing for was a set of already-unlocked blueprints –  is it really necessary to rebuild an entire kingdom from scratch during a casual game? It’s also super easy for malicious players to enter games, vandalize a bunch of buildings, and disappear.

Not-so-bonus for the spatially-challenged: if you put important buildings (like workshops) in awkward places (like right near a sheep farm), you will have a world of trouble getting things done. In some games, city planning is not such a big deal, but in this one, it really is. Fortunately, you can demolish and relocate badly-placed structures, but it’s a terrible habit to get into.

Rating:

Rating:

Moral of the (admittedly, way long) story: It’s a light, cutesy game that still satisfies as a civilization/sim game. Absolutely worth the 10 bucks, and without a doubt my favorite of the XBOX Live Arcade offerings. And did I mention that you get an achievement for punting the Keflings?