In general I try to keep an open mind with indie games and devs, looking for the silver linings and bright spots whenever possible. One thing that does enrage me to no end, and ends up deserving of any and all scorn, is shamelessly cribbing other people’s ideas and failing to do even remotely enough to differentiate yourself. While I’ve always considered the Kingdom series to be pretty brilliant in its simplicity and overall design, it has always surprised me how wide the love for the series has turned out to be. Apparently, that also has made it a target for developers with less original ideas and more desire to simply make a few pretty insubstantial changes to its formula and put something out into the market.

The Wild Age, unfortunately, does very little to meaningfully differentiate itself from Kingdom outside of answering the question of “What would Kingdom look like if it were in pretty janky 3D?” Conceptually the rest is almost entirely copied whole, with mostly the same units, flow, structure, and peripheral tasks Kingdom already got pretty well perfectly right… except this doesn’t even possess that same level of care or polish. Changing up a few units, making everything simply feel more generic, and somehow both simplifying your overall goals, while failing to do as good a job of intuitively making it clear what you should be doing, are what this has going for it. 

It still doesn’t hold a candle to the original series it has copied from, and demonstrates that the people behind Kingdom had far more than just a good idea on their hands, but also the care and attention to detail to make the most of it. This fails to meet the challenge it signed up for by shamelessly copying so many of someone else’s ideas on pretty well all fronts by comparison.