Test: Kingdom Two Crowns: Norse Lands (Tactics & Strategy)

Nothing changes?

Of course, Raw Fury and the development team currently in charge of Stumpy Squid haven’t done an excellent job of rewriting Kingdoms, the foundation of gameplay in the last six years. With Two Crowns, the game’s most significant and functional co-op mode was introduced as well as sloppy handling of winning options and the overall nature of the game. However, Deadlands and Shogun’s free additions were refined instead of flipping mechanics or content over their head. It’s the same when you pay for the excursion into the Viking world in Norse Lands. Even after six years, this method of building a two-dimensional strategy is based on a monarchy at the heart of how you construct a settlement. The ultimate goal is to obtain the six mysterious islands that you can roam and then travel around them in a completely free manner. However, the path to getting there is by building up, shifting the village’s boundaries, and exploring.

However, you’ll have many options for influence that are restricted to making coins and putting the coins in specific places. In a camp, you can recruit nomads in exchange for cash and make them the inhabitants of your community. They are given jobs (like a hunter, farmer, hunter, and home builder) or become soldiers to defend their village. Because as usual there are every night

attacks by the “greed,” sinister monsters, which can destroy not only the expensively built barricades and thus if necessary also reduce the catchment area of the settlement again, but above all after the coins and in particular the crown of the monarch strive. In the end, without cash, there’s no growth, no further expansions are possible, and the people who are scared by greed can’t be convinced to do their job and again. It’s a great thing that someone took the merchant traveling on the day before to present his items for sale and then go back to his primary residence with his earnings. If they take the crown and win, it’s “Game over” in the same way as it can be brutal.

A lot to be done. What else?

To live in the gorgeous pixels that are Norse Lands, however, not just cash for construction but also patience from the person playing on the screen is essential, particularly for those who are new to the minimalist building strategies. Another Kingdom tradition is necessary to learn and master all the things yourself. “Learning through doing” is pure and pure in culture. In

comparison to the early series, however, the level of demand doesn’t increase quite as quickly, so that you’re also allowed to make the one or another mistake without it going straight to your virtual existence. In the future, however, wrong choices are swiftly penalized. Kingdom will not let you down. There are a few introductory notes in the beginning, and there’s no explanation or tutorial. This could be a barrier. But with every discovery you make, every mechanism that becomes apparent and helps you understand the logical connections in the background, you’re immersed in this realm full of mystery.

However, you grow with each death and subsequent effort to avoid letting the kingdom realm bring you down. After ten to even 20 times, you’ll discover something new. For instance, the seasons change every 16 or so days and are inaugurated by a blood moon that appears to provoke the greedy monsters. Each time you reboot, you’re thinking of how to tackle things slightly differently. You don’t know what to do to combat the AI flaws of the populace. Sometimes it seems that the commands given by coins are ignored;

another time, unnecessarily long paths may be taken, so that the planned barricade to protect the village is not finished before nightfall. However, none of this can turn into a complete motivational halt. The best part is that all of the enhancements made to the game’s mechanics by Norse Lands are available to everyone who plays Kingdom Two Crowns and the sequel and the free “Conquest update” regardless of whether you have this expansion or do not. But, in addition to that, the new puzzle elements, not to mention the background of pixel art and the dramatic and dynamic soundtrack, make the cost of purchasing. If one is skeptical, one could argue that the characters were swapped to honor the Nordic mythology and culture – such as, for instance, if one previously saw red deer, today it’s moose. However, with a great deal of imagination for subtle but necessary modifications to the design, such as the slightly more dense forest in the background and the Norse Lands, are given a distinctive appearance.