Shadow of Kingdoms

Shadow of Kingdoms is an online strategy game that fuses several gameplay features from other genres. It has turn-based combat, castle building, a fantasy world, quests, RPG style of character development and a lot more. It all comes together in a nice way, and the best part is that it’s free to play.

The last sentence is there to deceive you, just like a first glance at Shadow of Kingdoms might deceive you to believe that it’s a good game.

I found Shadow of Kingdoms on Steam; it was free so why not give it a shot. After the first few seconds of gameplay I didn’t want to think that this is going to be another browser game that made it to Steam because people don’t do their homework and confuse free to play with a good game. Still, there it was, in all its ‘glory’.

Right from the start you’re taken through the forced tutorial that every browser and mobile strategy game has. It’s rarely nice, and this one is poorly done. No matter, I power through with the hope that the game opens up later on and it gets good. After building a structure, recruiting some units, and exploring a map, it seemed nice. Shadow of Kingdoms actually comes closer to being a real strategy game when compared to several others that share this design, model.

However, that good feeling I had about completely vanished a few minutes into the game when signs of plagiarism combined with bad design started to appear. On top of that, it became clear that Shadow of Kingdoms is something purely built to monetize.

First off, the tutorial takes over your first minutes of gameplay. One of its grand suggestions was to recruit a zombie. What could go wrong except for the ‘Ok’, confirmation button, to be disabled even though I had units available and tons of resources to hire them. As usual, for underdeveloped games, restarting it solved the problem.

Ok, I get that Heroes of Might and Magic was used as inspiration for this. I played my thousands of hours of HoMM 3 when I was in my teen years and a good hundred more for each of the following installments. I can deal with the copied battlefield grid from Heroes 6, I can accept the almost identical hero highlight aura in map exploration mode but I draw the line in having the same (almost exactly the same) sound effect for when you defeat a unit. It’s just not cool. Looking closer at the paved road textures, I compared them with screenshots from Heroes 6. The resemblance is upsetting. I refuse to believe it copied more.

There’s a fine line between inspiration and copying, and Shadow of Kingdoms rides a screaming elephant over that line. There’s no tact in this. What else is there that will grind your gears? Well, do you remember visiting the obelisks in Heroes 3 to find out where the treasure was buried? And remember that it looked like a puzzle and pieces would start disappearing with each found obelisk, yeah, Shadow of Kingdoms does the same thing.

Making a game and releasing it as a free-to-play title is a troublesome thing from some perspectives. The first and most important is that the people who made it have bills to pay, and it’s normal that they should have a source of income.

Shadow of Kingdoms won’t reach into your pockets with force but it will make you feel like you need to spend a few bucks just so you can keep enjoying it, whatever that last part means to some. After investing serious hours into it, creating a champion you feel proud off, it’s hard just to drop the game when all it costs is a small amount of cash. That’s how most pseudo-free-to-play titles work. More so since after a while, grinding away XP, resources and everything else gets boring.

It’s not that I hate this game for its looks or gameplay. Not even the poorly written storyline gets in the way. What is a deal breaker is the business model it’s based on and how much it copies.

After playing it, I’m close to saying that I’d rather share the torrent link to any Heroes of Might and Magic title with you if you could just steer you from it. However, I won’t but I can do the next best thing, which is to redirect you to the chance of getting on the Heroes VII Beta access waiting list.

In conclusion, if you don’t mind poor game design and a terrible business model, you might find Shadow of Kingdoms a decent game.