A World of Keflings (Xbox 360)
A video game sequel is a perfect opportunity to learn from the reactions of fans. Game mechanics can be refined and features that weren’t enjoyable can be dropped or retooled, and A Kingdom for Keflings feels like the kind of game where some obvious improvements would be made in the follow-up. It is clear some steps were taken in A World of Keflings to try and improve the decent city building concept from the first game, but what changes they decided to make feel like they don’t cut to the heart of what really held the first game back from being more enjoyable.
One improvement touted in the name though is that there is more setting variety this time around. In A World of Keflings, small gnome-like people called Keflings enlist the aid of a giant represented by the player’s Xbox Avatar to build them a kingdom. However, there are multiple types of Keflings this time around, the base game taking the player to visit civilizations found in icy regions, deserts, and a grassy forest world. The DLC would get even more fanciful with areas made out of food and outer space kingdoms, but no matter where you are, they’re always hoping for you to build whatever their region’s equivalent to a castle is. To do so though, you’ll need to gradually build your way up to it by building specialty buildings for crafting certain materials, refining harvested resources, and making your Keflings more intelligent. The Keflings themselves also need houses before they can start assisting with duties in the kingdom, the game controlling your population by only handing out hearts at certain story points or as rewards for completing quests, with Keflings being a vital resource to completing the kingdoms in a timely manner.
As the giant, most of the work falls on you to decide how the kingdom will be arranged. You are the only one who can build and this time around you can push completed buildings around if you want to make room for new places, but you also are able to mine resources yourself if you’re looking for something to do during downtime. However, the main purpose of your Keflings is to gather natural resources like sand, stone, and sheep wool while you busy yourself with other tasks, the Keflings able to have jobs assigned to them such as harvesting, delivery, or running refineries and other specialty buildings. Over the course of the game you will get a few assistants who will carry building parts about to speed up your actual construction of new places, but actually making a new building isn’t so common that it justifies them constantly crowding around your giant. They’ll often get in the way of you trying to grab something else as they eagerly rub against you despite only being useful during very specific projects, so their utility is lessened by how much of a hindrance these little buddies can be.
Most of your Keflings will do their tasks as they’re told though until you tell them to do something new, and the game has actually achieved a pretty good balance of giving new blueprints and hearts to keep you active throughout. There is definitely a heavy emphasis on the forest kingdom though, most of your time spent there despite the snow and desert kingdoms both having their own special buildings and resources to make things feel different despite following similar construction paths. When the forest kingdom does start to feel it has outstayed its welcome though, the game usually has you head off to one of the other kingdoms for a brief respite from what seems like most of the original game’s content ported over. Despite cutting this more acceptable pace that leads to less downtime though, A Kingdom for Keflings still has one unfortunate hold over of its pacing issues, that being your inability to just let the game run for a while to build up resources. After a small period of inactivity, your Keflings will realize the giant isn’t overseeing their work and do something even more insulting than in the first game. In the original, they just sat down, presumably tired. This time around though, when you’re gone, the Keflings will dance in place! This again must be to try and get you to actively work more often, perhaps joining the Keflings in their mining and logging activities, but those are very dry activities for you to be engaged with in the long term.
One large improvement made though would be the story to the affair. While the Keflings still crave their castle equivalents in every kingdom, the people have certain representatives who will speak to you and give you quests. Each kingdom has a few characters who will ask you to do certain things for rewards or plot progression, and a lot of these quest givers are made incredibly silly. A king who speaks in imagined words to try and sound intelligent, a stereotypical pirate who tries to frame everything he does as perfectly legit, a reverse genie who makes you grant his wishes, and other ridiculous little characters spice up quests that are mostly things like collecting a certain amount of resources or kicking your Keflings around enough times. Your progress is still mostly defined by the gradual unlocking of more building types, but the quests do give you side activities to engage in while your Keflings are still gathering necessary resources for the more important tasks. This is one reason the downtime is handled better this go around, but there will inevitably be periods where quests aren’t coming in and you’re just left to do menial work while waiting to have enough resources to get back to building a kingdom.
Despite having three kingdoms, A World of Keflings is still a game that wraps up surprisingly quickly. Part of this comes down to the sand and ice kingdoms being so small, their buildings unique but not really plentiful enough to support them for as long as the forest kingdom. You can work on beautifying your kingdoms once you’ve completed them, but besides a score quantifying the different objects you’ve placed, there’s not really any concerns typical of a city builder. Keflings live to work and don’t need anything to survive, their numbers are dependent on heart resources, and even the environments pack a few infinite mining spots so you’ll never technically run out of stuff to work with. There is an extra mode with building challenges to play after, but its more of the same even with its rule recontextualizing, the same process of delegating tasks to build up a new structure remaining the game’s focus. Multiplayer and DLC are the same in regards to just continuing things, and by the time you’ve wrapped up the main story, its already gotten a little stale. It’s a pace that works well enough when you have an end point to work towards, but its hardly compelling enough to warrant any repeat visits.
THE VERDICT: A World of Keflings focuses on its idea of structuring city building as a series of goals to work towards, the pace dictated by whatever building must be made next on your quest to finish all of the important structures in the kingdom. Optional quests and heading off to help the ice or sand kingdom prevent the main forest kingdom from getting too dull, but there will be some downtime no matter what, meaning that while the construction can be a pretty pressure-free yet structured building experience, the story only just manages to keep things together well enough. The variety of tasks and silly characters in the world help break up some of the monotony, but A World of Keflings ends up pretty similar to its predecessor in that working towards goals structures the experience decently, but there’s not much complexity under the hood to make it engaging or worth coming back to after the plot wraps up.
And so, I give A World of Keflings for Xbox 360…
An OKAY rating. Better pacing is definitely one of the things A Kingdom for Keflings needed, but it also would have benefited from letting your Keflings work on their own without supervision and having more to its tasks than building one thing to build the next thing. Having new areas with new resources and structures is a step in the right direction, but it’s pretty easy to see that most of these are just new names and looks for the same things you do in the other kingdoms. The more varied extra quests though are definitely an improvement, some asking you to not always go for purely efficient production as you need to please a character for a helpful reward. The small amount of deviations from A Kingdom for Keflings does make this a superior game, and the things that did work like constantly setting goals to achieve is what makes this approach to city building still interesting despite having few extra concerns outside the current task to worry about. Even with buildings designed purely for cosmetic purposes or messing around though, A World of Keflings feels like its devoted mostly to the practical kingdom building at its core, something that makes it interesting enough for one run of the story but gives little reason to be creative with your construction.
A World of Keflings still feels like a city builder in search of how its ideas can be best executed. Being goal focused and constantly active rather than micromanaging city systems feels like a concept with legs, but without much to do while waiting on resource accumulation. It does need some deeper layer of complexity to keep the player participating in a meaningful manner rather than forcing them to burn downtime by joining their Keflings in robotically harvesting ice or crystals. There is satisfaction to be found in growing the three kingdoms, but it seems like it might take another sequel to really make these systems involved enough to keep the play involved in an interesting way.