Shaun M Jooste 
Kingdoms and Castles Review PS5 | City-Building Sim
Welcome to my Kingdoms and Castles review for PS5! Read more about the story, gameplay, visuals, audio, and other aspects that make it great!
Operating System: PS5
Application Category: Game
4.5
Welcome to my Kingdoms and Castles review for PS5! Developed and published by Lion Shield, the city-building simulation game is now available for console. Start small and build your village on an island while keeping the peace or announcing war against AI bots.
I’ve extensively played this game for several hours for my Kingdoms and Castles review. The fun and excitement hardly ever end. Well, until you fill every space on your island or conquer the other nations. It also takes some strategy to keep your people happy and your kingdom going.
Want to know more? Read my detailed Kingdoms and Castles review below!
Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of this product from https://www.keymailer.co. Still, this review is based on my personal experience of the game and is not impacted by the gift.
Story Review | Rule the Land, Me Lord
The first part of my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review is about the story, or at least what propels you forward in the city-building game. You’ll have some missions to complete if you want to succeed and keep your people satisfied. Let’s take a look.
Choose Your Mode
When you begin your adventure, you need to choose between Standard or Creative mode. With Standard Mode, you’ll play as usual. You’ll mine and scout for resources to build your kingdom, and disasters will appear along the way. With Creative Mode, you can build as you wish to test the various features and tools without worrying about resources. You can also spawn villagers at your will.
Setting Up Your Kingdom
I went for Standard Mode for my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review. You’ll need to name your kingdom and select a banner first. From here, you’ll need to set up your kingdom with a small panel of options. These include map size, type of terrain (land or island), and how many rivers you’d like (some, none, or random). When you’ve clicked on New Map, you can decide how many AI bots you want to play against.
Starting with Nothing
Here is where the city-building game really begins. You have no buildings yet, as you’ll need to decide where you want to place your small Keep and start a quiet hamlet. For my Kingdoms and Castles review on PS5, I found it best to place it near the shore where there’s fresh water, by trees, and as close to some rocks as possible. By doing so, you ensure a good start to your kingdom.
Expanding Your Kingdom
Once you get the ball rolling, you’ll need to expand your village over the rest of the island. I’ll explain how it’s done in the gameplay part of my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review. For the story, all you need to know is that you need to listen to your people. Small notes will appear that show what they’re unhappy about. If you want to become a vast kingdom, I suggest you pay attention. It will encourage more people to live on your land.
Ruler of the Lands
Eventually, you’ll meet ambassadors from other lands. They’ll exchange pleasantries, ask to establish trade routes or ask you for advice. I went the peaceful route, trying to create happy relations between us. However, you have the option to be nasty and eventually take over their kingdoms.
How Long to Play Kingdoms and Castles?
It took me 3 hours to play the game for my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review video above. In that time, I filled my small island quite quickly. Reading other reviews and player times, you can easily clock in between 5 to 6 hours. If you’re like me, you’ll want to start a bigger map and play again. That means you can play endlessly until you become bored.
Final Thoughts on Kingdoms and Castles Review Story Elements
Much like similar games like SimCity and Civilization VI, your main goal is simply to build and expand. How you do so is up to you. There’s no convoluted plot, but the other nations add some spice with their fun discussions and questions. Some of the talks made me chuckle. I really loved this element.
Gameplay Review | Managing Your Kingdom
The next part of my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review focuses on the gameplay aspect. Here, I’ll show you what it’s like to play the city-building game and how easy it is to master. Let’s go into the mechanics!
Learning How to Play Kingdoms and Castles
The game makes it easy for you to learn how to play. There’s a small message bar at the top right, plus you have tooltips when you hover over items. Clicking on objects tells you exactly what you need to know about them. Also, clear button icons show you how to access various areas, so there’s no steep learning curve here.
Resources and Building
The first aspect you’ll need to learn about the game is collecting resources and crafting buildings. You’ll start with the basics in the beginning, unlocking more advanced structures at a later stage. The most important resources at the start are food, wood, and stone. Later, you’ll need to tax your villagers to get gold.
Stockpiling Resources
Another lesson I’d like to teach you in my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review or guide is to stockpile resources. Later, you’ll need plenty of them for the winter months or to trade. Build some granaries or stone platforms to make sure you never run out. You also get to place markets at a later stage so your villagers have easy access to food and ingredients.
Roads and Building Range
You can’t build too far from your structures or roads. Expanding relies on placing more paths and then buildings along them. While you start small, you’ll eventually want to lie down a network of roads for access to various facilities. Their placement is essential for how many buildings and homes you can construct on your limited land.
Changing Priorities
You’ll reach a point where you’ll need more of one resource than another, and you only have so many villagers. There’s a tab where you can adjust priorities and tell your people what to focus on more. It’s a handy feature instead of clicking on them and telling them where to go. Later, you can always switch them back to normal production. If you take any advice from my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review, let it be this: shift priorities when necessary.
Various Types of Food
I love how you can create various types of food. In similar games, you usually just build farms and let your people eat as they wish. With Kingdoms and Castles, you don’t only provide wheat, pork, and fish. Well, at the start, you do. Moving on, you get to make bakeries and fisheries that make other types of food that they are asking for. That’s where resource management comes into play.
Seasonal Changes
When I first saw there were seasonal changes in Kingdoms and Castles for my PS5 review, I wasn’t happy. I had a feeling my people would die simply because I wasn’t prepared. Yet, the game surprised me. If you plan well and stockpile your resources, your people will survive the winter. My fear turned to jubilation when I realised it wasn’t that difficult to manage.
Dealing with Disasters
Now, disasters are something I would have preferred not to be in the game. However, my biggest problem was with random fires that exploded now and again. Still, this is also not a significant issue. With enough ‘fire stations’ or wells around the map, the villagers deal with these quickly. Even if they don’t, you can quickly remove the rubble and start again.
I understand why disasters play a role in these games. Like I said, it’s not a big issue. But if I had to find a downside for my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review, it would be this. And since it’s not a big one, it tells you just how enjoyable the game is.
Making Deals and Trading
I mentioned earlier in my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review that you’ll meet ambassadors from other nations. These are the AI bots you added at the start of the game. They will offer you deals and ask you to exchange items.
Also, they will send ships to your dock to sell and buy products. You can also establish trade routes, telling the ships what they need to buy and sell at other docks. When done right, this can be your most lucrative business in the entire kingdom.
Research for a Better Kingdom
When you make enough gold and other resources, you’ll unlock the Great Library. Sure, there are smaller libraries, but that’s just to make people happy. This magnificent building lets you research specific elements to enhance production. It’s not as extensive as Civilization, so don’t expect a space race. It just helps to speed up production and make your workers more effective.
Increasing Citizen Happiness
The most significant element of Kingdoms and Castles that will impact your land is citizen happiness. On the bottom of the screen, you’ll see kingdom details with numbers in green, orange, or red. The greener these numbers, the better. It shows you what they need or desire to increase happiness. It can be anything from more food to more houses or the placement of a cemetery.
Health and Death
Speaking of cemeteries, let me touch on health and death in my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review. Your villagers grow old and die, as is the way of life. You can use the same kingdom’s tab to see the quality of life and how many people are sick and need hospitals. When people die, you need to bury them, or families will become disgruntled. This aspect quickly became nasty later on in the game for me.
How Easy is it to Play Kingdoms and Castles Review?
When I compare Kingdoms and Castles to similar games like Civilization VI, I would say it’s relatively easy to play. Civ6 becomes way too complicated for me, and I end up not enjoying it so much. Of course, the console version is much easier than PC. As for Kingdoms and Castles, I didn’t find it all that challenging. Then again, I played the easiest mode without conflict.
Final Thoughts on Kingdoms and Castles Review Gameplay Elements
.I love the gameplay of Kingdoms and Castles. There are some fun elements, and it’s not too challenging. I suspect putting conflict on with the greater difficulty modes will produce some curse words on my side, but I was happy with the peaceful mode. I’m glad it was an option.
Audio-Visual Review | Eye of the Eagle
The final section of my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review deals with what you see and hear. While it has great mechanics, will you enjoy spending hours looking at and listening to it? Let’s have a look.
Enjoyable Graphics
Personally, I find the visuals quite favourable. It has a cartoonish style to it, with the buildings and resources enjoyable to view. Even the ships and fish in the water were lovely, and I didn’t find anything that looked terrible. It’s a fantastic job from the visual design department.
Stunning Visual Interface
Even more impressive was the visual interface. As I mentioned before in my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review, it’s clear which buttons to press for specific function areas. Also, I like how the crafting rows appear and disappear as you work through the menus. Really great work.
Excellent Animations
I love watching the villagers at work, even if they just run around doing their work. Also, the seasonal changes are awesome to view, especially when it begins to snow. The crops and people may not like it, but I certainly do.
Soft Music, Action Sounds
As you play the game, there’s soft music playing in the background. It changes with specific situations, such as an ambassador talking to you or a disaster breaking out. What I enjoyed and need to mention in my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review are the action sounds. When you place roads, buildings, or destroy trees, there are accompanying sounds that simply add value to the game. Otherwise, it would just be bland.
No Voice Acting
Unfortunately, there’s no voice acting. It doesn’t make the game bad. Also, there aren’t walls of text that would have called for it. However, it is an element I judge in every game review, so I wanted to cover it for Kingdoms and Castles.
Final Thoughts on Kingdoms and Castles Review Audio-Visual Elements
While the graphics and sound may seem basic to some gamers, they suit Kingdoms and Castles. I prefer this style to more realistic visuals. The animations are awesome, and the graphics are enjoyable to view while building and waiting for time to pass. Thanks for the amazing visual interface for the PS5!
Kingdoms and Castles Review PS5: Final Verdict
As my final word for my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review verdict, I love the game. I can easily spend hours starting a new game and expanding my kingdom. As a matter of fact, I quickly became addicted to it and had to stop myself from playing it another night so I could review the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection: Volume 1. It’s really impressive, and I hope to get my hands on the Nintendo Switch version when it launches.
Is Kingdoms and Castles worth buying?
Yes, especially for city-building fanatics. You can play the harder modes if you love a challenge, but I’m happy with the peaceful mode. I’m so grateful this was on the PS5, as I spend more time on console than PC.
What other games are like Kingdoms and Castles?
Before I exit my PS5 Kingdoms and Castles review, here are similar games based on my experience playing this genre:
- Civilization VI
- SimCity
- Banished
- Stronghold
- Frostpunk
- Endzone: A World Apart
What I liked and didn’t like about Kingdoms and Castles Review
Pros:
- Delightful visuals and sound
- Easy and enjoyable mechanics
- Seasonal changes
- Crafting menus
- Detailed icon tooltips
- Meeting ambassadors
- Establishing trade routes
- Satisfaction with ruling an island
Cons:
- Not fond of disasters
- No voice acting
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