Giveaway of the Day - KingMania

General Introduction and Installation:

Today’s giveaway was originally given away on May 25th 2008. It received a positive 70% out of 412 votes and there were 69 comments which you can read HERE. There was also a thread created over in the forums for post-game problems, tips and tricks (though no one has posted any yet, lol). You can check that thread out HERE (I’ll be updating the post when I have the time later today; you’ll need to register to post any information.

It was then given away a second time only six weeks later, which probably accounts for the much lower positive score of 49% out of 573 votes. You can read the comments from that giveaway HERE

The game downloads at just over 24Mb, and the installed game takes up a little under 27Mb. The ???? problem that we have been getting recently with game giveaways during installation persists; however the game can still be installed easily by clicking the bottom left button. The default installation path is to your root directories games folder (i.e. C:\games\ – unless you have your windows installation on a different hard drive; for example I have my windows installation on my E: drive so the game installs to E:\Games\). The game version is the original plus the North Kingdom v1.5 expansion pack so this is an updated version to the one we originally received which didn’t contain the North Kingdom expansion.

As is usual for game giveaways there is no shortcut created either on the desk top or in the Start Menu programs list, so you will need to create your own. The game is free standing, so can be transferred from one computer to others if you wish. If you want a shortcut in the programs list, but don’t know how to create one, I’ve posted a short tutorial which can be found in the game discussion section of the main forum. You can find it HERE.

Game Introduction:

Play a quick action strategy game, different from any you have seen before! Kingmania is a fast and simple, yet challenging, game that will test your ability to make quick tactical decisions. You control different buildings, using their power and the power of hordes of your lieges to defeat your opponents. And if you like online challenges, you can play with your friends in multiplayer mode!

reference accessed HERE on the24th May 08

The Game:

Yeah, another game by 300 A.D/ Rake in Grass; they do seem to be able to create some unusual and playable games. Kingmania is no exception, with reasonable graphics, a novel take on the strategy genre and a darned good challenge as well. King Mania challenges you to make quick tactical decisions, and build suitable defenses with a number of different structural upgrade to protect your cities.

As your army grows and your Kingdom expands through capturing your enemies cities, so does your ability to remove the rival king from his throne, which is the main aim of the game. Kingmania is a simple game to learn, but a hard one to beat. It’s also a good game for beginners and veteran strategy players alike. Don’t let the slightly childlike quality the game’s graphic style has put you off at least trying this quality arcade game. (please note its an arcade game and not a triple AA top dollar strategy game like the recently released King Arthur _ The role playing War game or Empire Total War, so don’t expect in depth resource management or vast armies.

There is a series of 41 island battlegrounds to play in Kingmania, (that includes the original game, which had 30 levels plus 11 additional levels with the addition of the North Kingdom expansion). The aim of the game is to capture and upgrade various neutral medieval structures as well as capturing and upgrading gold mines, farming villages, mage’s towers, additional castles, and scout buildings from your opponent. With these captured assets you create more troops and resources, with the goal of having enough forces to capture your enemy’s castle and eliminate any stray troops he may have wandering about.

As you progress from one level to the next, the difficulty increases from an initial easy start to ultra hard, plus there are some variations on the basic scenario. For example, in some battles, you start with two castles, in others you start with only a humble village in your possession and you must build up a mass of farmers to storm a castle.

Your troops are either knights, who can only be created at your castle, or farmers, which are created in the villages. Additional offensive capabilities are offered in the form of spells, which are available as upgrades to your castles or mage towers.

Resources such as Gold and food are gathered at either gold mines or farming villages. You use these resources to upgrade your structures by enhancing their troop production capabilities, resource-gathering capabilities, or the offensive/defensive capabilities of the troops or the structures themselves. You can get a rough idea of the number of your opponents’ troops in a given location by placing your mouse pointer over a building, but to get accurate numbers you have to capture enemy scout towers.

Basically Kingmania is a simplified real time strategy game (r.t.s.). Just like all the $50 AAA titles out there, your goals are to make sure you have an adequate production flow of troops and resources, and that you are doing a good job of shuffling them around so that you can ward off your opponent’s attacks. You must also keep building to improve your offensive capabilities, and ultimately attack your opponent’s “home base.” And again, just like the “big-gun” strategy games, winning can only come about by successfully balancing how you divide your resources between troop buildup (and between types of troops), defense, offensive upgrades and “secret weapons.”

What brings it down to the casual-game level is the reduced scope of the battles. Each battle seems to last anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes, and to the best of my recollection (I’ve not played the game since I last reviewed it apart from a quick taster last night to refresh my memory) no battlefield has more than a dozen structures to fight over. Because the structures and terrain are fixed, you won’t be building more buildings, and because the game play area is small, there’s no need to send scouts out to roll back “the fog of war.” In fact, given that the “troops” can only be moved from structure to structure, and do not engage each other outside of those structures, as far as actual game mechanics go, Kingmania could have eliminated them entirely and had the buildings slug it out with ballistic weapons. The game does allow you to save a record of your progress across the larger map, but on the other hand it does not allow you to save in the middle of a battle. In that regard it reminds me very much of the casual-game or arcade style of play as opposed to the larger more ambitious trip AAA big bucks titles.

There is a multiplayer mode, but you wont find any servers set up by the developer. You will have to host a game yourself (or one of your friends; usually the one with the best computer and the widest bandwidth. It’s relatively straightforward to set up. If you have any problems please post queries in the thread I’ve linked to above in the general introduction

The following two images are from the Northern Kingdom add-on. (all images are courtesy of 300AD)

Main game features:

- 41 levels with unique battlefields
- More than 30 structure upgrades
- 5 mass destruction spells
- 5 opponents with different strategies – find their weak spots!
- Multiplayer mode to play with your friends online!
- Original music tracks
- Northern Kingdom add-on included

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Useful Information

System Requirements:

O.S…………………………………………XP/Vista
c.p.u………………………………………1.2GHz
Video RAM…………………………….64MB
3D Video……………………………….OpenGL recommended

with the Expansion ……… DX9.0c

Video:

If you want to see what the game looks like you can watch a You Tube video of Kingmania game play HERE.
or look at loads of images all on one page HERE or as a slideshow HERE. I’ve even posted some image links from Google HERE, HERE and HERE

Reviews worth reading:

If you want to read some worthwhile reviews to decide whether this game is for you check out the following reviews HERE and some shorter comment based reviews HERE

Music

When you move your mouse cursor over a building a castle, farm or over trops moving between buildings you get appropriate noises such as the sound of farm animals if you hover over a farm, or the sound of trumpets and martial music if its over a castle. The music is also martial and almost classical in a synthesized sort of way. The sounds and music fit the games theme very well so its probably best if you leave the music untouched; however if you really hate the music it can be changed for something more to your taste. You’ll have to edit the zipped game file found within the main folder. You’ll find the music files within the dat\music folder within the zipped game file. There’s five files all in the ogg format. You’ll need to convert your files to ogg, then rename them to the titles you find (kingmania_track1.ogg etc).

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Conclusion:

I recommend downloading and trying this game out; though if you’re not sure, check out the video link that I’ve posted above as it gives you an idea as to what the game play looks like. Playing it on the hardest difficulty setting (accessible from the levels map) makes for a very challenging game. Be sure to know the game mechanics before you try it on this setting as otherwise you’ll soon lose your wizards tower and castle (and thus lose the ability to create new knights). The graphics are of the isometric form, with the ability to pan around and zoom in using the mouse cursor and simple controls that you’ll find in game. I don’t think I could play it for protracted periods though, because the game play does become a little tedious after awhile which makes this an ideal arcade game for filling up those odd few minutes you’ve nothing better to do. (I recommend playing it for no more than about half an hour at a time, but I’m not the best person to suggest such things as I find it hard to concentrate on even the best of games for more than several minutes, lol) It’s a change from the usual puzzlers, arkanoids and shooters; requiring a little strategy as well as luck to progress.

It’s definitely worth a 7 out of 10 IMO and will be staying on at least one of my computers. I discovered after checking the registry that this particular game is free standing, which means you can transfer it from one computer to another once you’ve installed the giveaway version.

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Tried it on Win7.
All the screens blink too much – even when I run in Compatibility Mode.

…..MODERATOR COMMENT………

Go into the options menu and try changing the graphics driver from the default OpenGL to D3D (direct X) It may be a conflict due to the addition of the Northern Kingdom which is Direct X driven wheras the main game prefers OpenGL. You could also try changing the screen rersolution and pehaps trying it in a window.

Finally if none of that works try updating your main graphics drivers. (if you haven’t already)