Kingdoms and Castles is a so called city builder, set on an island in a medieval world. You start with a small castle and a handful of hard-working peasants. Your goal is to build up a sprawling city around an imposing castle.
The developer of Kingdoms and Castles is the two-man-indie-studio
Lion Shield. The game is available DRM-free on
Itch.io and
GOG, and you can get it on
Steam as well. It costs 9.99 (either US$ or €uro).
The game starts quite simple. You find a place to build your castle. Preferably with trees, stone and fertile ground nearby. After your castle stands, you mark trees to chop down. Make sure to free up space to build a quarry next to stones, as well as a forester next to trees. Connect them with roads to the castle. Then build some houses for your people to live in, and farms to feed them. Then you've managed to set up the base of your future city!
Kingdoms and Castles offers rather relaxed gameplay, where your main goal is to balance all the different resources as well as possible. So your people are happy and your settlement grows. To give you a little challenge, depending on the difficulty you've picked, the game sends Viking raiders or fire breathing Dragons to your island. Be sure to prepare for these attacks by setting up defenses or even an army.
The art style of Kingdoms and Castles is based on block graphics. This might not be everyone's cup of tea. In my opinion, it gives the game a cute look. I like just watching, as my people do their work in my Kingdom.
The game has awesome medieval-like background music, composed and produced by Jason Taylor. The soundtrack is available to buy on
Bandcamp for 7.50 £ (British pound sterling).
Kingdoms and Castles is in constant active development. Quite regularly new features are being added. There are two features I want to point out.
It got Twitch integration recently. A streamer can connect the game to their Twitch channel, and the viewers can vote on various events to happen, either good or bad ones. It's set up straightforward and works flawlessly.
When you start a game, you can select a banner for your new Kingdom. You can even design your banner. Just look in the directory
~/.config/unity3d/LionShield/Kingdoms and
Castles/CustomBanners and take the file
banner_reference.png as reference for your own banner. Save it as PNG in the same directory.
I've test played the most recent version 115r12, as provided by Itch.io, on
Manjaro Linux (Kernel 5.2.8) with
KDE Plasma desktop (version 5.16.4). My rig has an AMD Ryzen 7 1700x CPU, 32 GB RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card. I use Nvidias proprietary drivers (version 430.40).
Hatnix (aka The King of Linux Gaming) is a streamer, programmer, and long time Linux user. He is not just an expert Linux user, he is also a valuable educator in the community.
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