How many trees have I chopped down in video games? I pondered this as Kingdom of Fallen: The Last Stand handed me a sharp stone and asked me to hack at a tree trunk. It was a slow process, so I had a lot of time to ponder. Surely by now I’ve cut down enough trees to register as a moderate ecological disaster. My digital carbon footprint must be horrendous. But those poorly thought out log cabins with strange bone ornaments aren’t going to build themselves.
Sadly, Kingdom of Fallen is a pretty poor example of a tree-murdering simulator. It has the whiff of a ‘concept’ game about it. Its scope is miniscule and it pulls together elements of different genres but never quite explores them; offering little more than a handful of promising ideas. I figure the best way to approach this review is just to recount my total time with it. You should quickly learn that my general feeling towards Kingdom of Fallen can be boiled down to one word: unfinished.
Beware The Bowl Cut
The story begins with our hero being pulled into a strange world. Once there, it turns out he’s been cursed with two things: a missing daughter and a horrific bowl cut. Once I’d gained control, I was given the age old survival game quest: pick up rocks. I picked up three rocks and somehow combined them into a sharp stone. That raised the first warning light about Kingdom of Fallen: crafting is a time-based system. That all but guarantees you’ll be twiddling your thumbs when it comes to the big items. Still, I gathered rocks and sticks, and made the requisite axe and pickaxe. Then it was time to deal with hunger and thirst.
These are a little too easy to deal with. Endlessly respawning boars take care of hunger and numerous, endless wells deal with thirst. Ah well. I was also told to gather some ‘corns’, which were near the ‘wood house’. Thanks to the rain, fog, and awful map, I couldn’t see a wood house so blundered in the wrong direction and into an orc camp. That led inexorably to combat. It… isn’t great. I won by running in circles around the orc and swiping with my axe. Combat has no weight to it. I might as well have been wiping my axe on his backside. Guns feel a little better, but even the bigger swords feel unsatisfying.
Things brightened up a bit when I was told to make myself a base. Not being one for aesthetics, all my bases turn into horrible wooden shacks anyway, so it was nice to see Kingdom of Fallen embracing that. In truth, I like how simplified the basebuilding is. You pick the component you want and it snaps itself in place. Walls lock to walls and doors slot in well. I often find that survival games overcomplicate their base building, so this was something of a refreshing change.
Quizzical Quests
During my ‘wood house’ blundering, I’d also stumbled on a town and managed to pick up a couple of Kingdom of Fallen’s quests. I should note, the writing is pretty horrendous. Part mangled ‘medieval’ dialogue and part, well, cringeworthy. There is a line that is simply ‘^_^’, which brought up terrible memories of my teenage years that I thought years of cider had erased. The actual quests aren’t really noteworthy, being largely fetch quests. Even in such a short game, they get a little grindy. One needed me to grind thirty bones, which only really dropped from skeleton warriors.
Still, eventually I ground enough to construct a strange hourglass like object, which led to the quests just stopping altogether. Okay then. Another hour of blundering led me down some stairs, past a horde of skeletons to a door guarded with a purple fog. That reminded me that Kingdom of Fallen is inspired by souls-like games. That made the ensuing boss fight a little disappointing. It folded within a minute, doing little damage. Then it gave me a full set of golden armour and an honest-to-goodness rocket launcher, snapping what challenge was left over its knee.
Not long after that, I found my daughter, interacted with her magical prison and then it cut to credits. I was a little bemused after that. Five hours in and it was over, without ceremony. Reloading an earlier save, I wandered around for a bit. Fought another boss, who also died in seconds, and tried fishing. Caught a lot of strangely textured fish. Graphics all round are a bit of a hodgepodge. The landscape looks nice, especially the giant statues in the background, but things like the grenade launcher feel strangely out of place. Enemy models have a whiff of different asset packs being muddled into one. It’s an odd feeling.
Kingdom of Fallen – Not Ready For Primetime
There are other bouts of strangeness too. Quite a few bugs, for one. Both myself and enemies would regularly sink into the floor. When I tried to pick up a key for a quest, it duplicated itself multiple times in my inventory. Then there are the weird elements that don’t make sense – aside from that grenade launcher (which has a rocket launcher model, by the way). You can lock doors, for one, and place a totem that claims land. I had to double check that this was a singleplayer game. Enemies don’t really leave the small slice of space they patrol. I’m not confident they could open a door, either.
All of this leads me to believe that Kingdom of Fallen is more of a proof of concept than anything else. It’s like a university project. A couple of promising ideas stitched together using a handful of stock assets, but without the spit and polish required to make it shine. That wouldn’t be a bad thing, but attaching a price tag to it means it has to be judged by the same standards as others in the genre. Survival and souls-like are saturated genres, so Kingdom of Fallen doesn’t make an impact. Nice fodder for a portfolio, perhaps, but not ready for the big time.
