NinjaBee is hard at work on its fourth Xbox Live Arcade game, A Kingdom for Keflings. The developer, responsible for games like Outpost Kaloki X and Band of Bugs, is preparing to deliver a city-building game that puts the lives of a race of little people called Keflings in your hands. They need direction and your giant hands are the only ones that can help. This is no simple task, though, in a game that purportedly can take up to 15 hours to complete.
A Kingdom for Keflings opens up innocuously enough. You select a giant that you'll control throughout the game and start work helping the Keflings to build a city. At the beginning of the game, there isn't much to do. You see, it requires skilled Keflings and particular tools and materials to build advanced buildings and your town begins as a patch of dirt and some ignorant villagers. You'll start by building a few basic buildings such as houses, a town square and a workshop. To do this, you'll have to set your Keflings to work gathering resources, a task that is as simple as picking them up and dropping them where you want them to start harvesting. Then do the same with where you want them to bring what they've collected. After that, they'll continue to do that task repeatedly until you tell them to do something else.
It doesn't take long, say 30 minutes or so with hard work, before the game opens up and becomes much more complex. The good news is that it shouldn't ever be overwhelming, even to the most novice of players. The reason for that is that there isn't any way to lose the game. You may not be as skilled as someone else, but that just means you'll move along at your own pace. The game is designed to be as relaxing as possible, while still being a game you don't want to put down. So far, so good. Once the building tech-tree opened up, I found it tough to tear myself away from the game to write this preview.
The simple task of gathering resources to build structures quickly expands into a fairly involved affair. To put together each building, you're required to follow a set of blueprints. A house, for example, requires a hearth, storage, and a bedroom, each requiring a small bit of stone or timber. Build the three parts and then assemble them where you'd like the house to be. That's as simple as it gets. Sometimes buildings will have blueprints that require you to build parts at several different workshops (each specializes in certain structures). Others will require more refined materials such as planks instead of simple logs. For that, you'll have to build refineries and have your Keflings operate a complex supply chain. We just now built a basic school that can educate Keflings to the point of being able to operate more complicated workshops, which will then be able to create new materials, which can then be used to build a new building, which will then open up more options on the tech tree. Phew.
The end goal is to build a castle, the ultimate structure and final piece to any self-respecting village. Along the way, you'll find new tools that allow you to harvest things like gems and sheep's wool or others that simply allow you or the Keflings to perform tasks faster. Since you're not rushed to complete any tasks, you might also find yourself doing a few of the optional tasks the game presents. Build an artisan structure and you can paint the buildings a rainbow of colors. Walk up to the mayor and he'll ask you to complete a small side mission. I suggest you do as many of these as possible. In the early goings, it's the key to increasing the number of villagers you have at your disposal. Then, though it's not a mission, there's the fun of just walking around kicking sheep and Keflings. Being a giant comes with its fair share of perks.
A Kingdom for Keflings offers co-operative play over Xbox Live for up to four players and is due out on Xbox Live Arcade this fall.