Westward Kingdoms Game Review
Westward’s hit time management adventure game series is back with a whimsy twist in Westward Kingdoms! Exiled by their father the king for being spoiled brats, Prince Fenwick and Princess Catherine must prove their worth by helping neighboring kingdoms fend off evil monsters and build prosperous cities and fortresses. Help the Prince and Princess grow into the roles they were born for using your time and resource management skills!
Westward Kingdoms is the latest game from the creators of Westward, the hit series of old west-themed time management adventure games. The concept and gameplay in Kingdoms is similar to the original series, but with a fantasy theme. You help kings defend their land from barbarians instead of protecting cowboy settlers from bandits and raiders. And instead of building lounges and train stations, this time you will need to build watchtowers and barracks.
You choose if you want to play as Prince Fenwick or Princess Catherine. At the beginning of the game, while you are busy acting pompous and enjoying the life of idle nobility, you receive a note from your father the king. Apparently, he thinks you are too useless to be the heir to the throne and has exiled you from the kingdom until you learn to be a good leader. Unable to show his amazing management skills to the local peasants, he set out for foreign lands in search of kings and nobles who needed his help.
If you’ve played any of Westward’s games before, you’ll feel right at home with the game’s controls and mechanics. And because of its fantasy world setting, it bears more than a passing resemblance to one of the giants of the real-time strategy game genre: Warcraft. You have a similar environment and resource management system, and you even have the hilarious retorts and exclamations of your pawns every time you click on them, something any Warcraft player will fondly remember.
However, Westward Kingdoms is not the intense action packed game that Warcraft is famous for. Things happen at a slower pace here, and you can take your time planning your next actions or just enjoying the scenery. Also, the focus here is not to create the most efficient troop and resource producing city. Rather, the game is more like an adventure game, where your main character accepts missions to chase down the bad guys from the kingdom or construct buildings to improve defense and the local economy. However, don’t worry if you are unfamiliar with these types of games; the missions act as tutorials to slowly introduce you to all the mechanics of the game.
Most of the game revolves around building buildings, gathering resources, fighting bad guys, and hunting for treasures. Because you are royalty, many of these tasks are below you. Therefore, you need to find peasants and soldiers to do the job for you! Peasants are needed to do domestic work, such as collecting construction resources, as well as gold and food. Soldiers are needed to protect the land from baddies, ranging from a single bored barbarian at the beginning of the game to dragons and other monsters as you gain more experience.
However, these peasants and soldiers do not work for free (what happened to forced labor?) You will have to feed and house them. If there are not enough homes for the peasants, they will just sit around doing nothing. If there aren’t enough barracks, you won’t be able to hire more soldiers, and your existing soldiers will only fight at half their strength. There are many other buildings, such as the blacksmith, the library and the gold mine, to turn your kingdom into a military and economic powerhouse. These can be researched and built once the time is right and you have obtained the necessary resources.
This new Westward game is a departure from the rough art style of the previous games. However, the bright, cartoonish fantasy style is refreshing and works great. The things the characters say are fun too. You will spend half your time laughing at jokes and moaning at puns. And since this is a fantasy game, a bit of magic is also added. Got a damsel stuck at the top of a tower with her entrance blocked? Just buy a magic bean from the merchant and grow a bean stalk to reach it! However, there is only one bad thing in the game. Moving a character requires you to click on the character, then hold and drag the cursor to where you want it to go. This is fine for short distances, but it gets cumbersome when you try to move them away from the screen.
That complaint aside, Westward Kingdoms is a fun and delightful adventure where you embark on an age-old quest to save your fellow humans from harm and prove yourself. If you liked previous Westward games or similar time and resource management games like Roads of Rome II, you will love Westward Kingdoms.
Rating: 4.0 / 5.0