Kingdom Two Crowns is a some sort of resource management, exploration, survival side-scrolling game. as the game describes it: Build, Expand, Defend. This time with co-op mode.
You play as a monarch, a king or a queen, There are 3 different campaign of the game which is Two Crowns (Classic Medieval), Shogun (Feudal Japan), or Dead Lands (Where you play as characters from Bloodstained). You start with nothing but some coins. find and build a campsite, recruit some villagers, build tools to convert those villagers into units such as builders and hunters, everything requires coins.
The first map will always give you a small but steady amount of coins via a trader, afterwards you have to rely on the hunters or explore to hopefully find a treasure chest full of coins. Any small mistake in the beginning will ruin the game for you. such as not having any coins and you accidentally made all of the villagers into hunters. or builders. you wont be able to recruit anything. you cant generate coins. and the game will come into a halt.
And then comes another aspect, surviving. Every night, a bunch of tiny creatures called Greed will come to attack. they will hit your units and steal their tools, turning them back into villagers. worse, they will hit them again and turn them back into un-recruited villagers. and you have to spend some coins to recruit them and buy the tools again.
That is unless the Greed attacked you, and it will make you drop your coins and steal them. If you have no more coins, it will make you drop your crown and it’s game over for you.
So you have to build walls, defensive fortifications, recruit more hunters to defend against their attacks. Expand your kingdoms and create more ways to get coins. explore and clear more lands. build more, repeat. all the while balancing how to explore each daylight and quickly escape at night back to your fort.
The exploration, thankfully is quite fun to play. you’ll keep finding all sort of different structures, some small hut with villagers you can recruit to get more units. some hidden secrets. as well as different mounts. Some of these can only be unlocked by gems. that you have to find via treasure chests.
This game is either too easy or too hard at times. sometimes you find yourself building the wrong things and suddenly you don’t have enough gold, sometimes you make the wrong tools and now you lack hunters. Other times you’ll have far more coins than you can spend in your limited pouch. The more you play. the more you discover. the more interesting the game becomes.
The graphic is done in a beautiful pixel art, even as side scrolling you can’t help but admire all the wonders and the exploration. the music is simple yet haunting.
However. The Switch version seems to suffer from long load times and stutters here and there everytime you explore and when the game is autosaving. This doesn’t really deter from the experience. just a bit annoying.
If you like town management/ survival. This game is a must-have. it’s a 8/10 from me.
