“Build a robot, rescue the princess, make friends with a dragon and help a creepy witch get even creepier.”
This is the first line taken from NinjaBee’s description of A World of Keflings. It actually does a pretty good job of detailing some of the tasks you’ll find yourself saddled with throughout the 5+ hour campaign. It also gives you an idea of just how random a lot of the experience can be. Personally, I was sold after “Build a robot.”
A World of Keflings is mostly an expanded version of the original A Kingdom for Keflings. You still control a giant, gather resources to use in building construction and swap a lot of hats. You still create buildings piece-by-piece. You still have to grab your Keflings individually in order to assign them jobs or slap a new level into them. However, this time around you’re given access to three different locations — an arctic, forest, and desert kingdom — instead of a single one. This means you get a nice change of scenery every once in a while, some slightly different buildings to construct, and climate-specific Keflings to grab.
Playing the game is simply a matter of getting Keflings to gather resources, making buildings and working your way down the tree of blueprints until you’ve created every structure on the list. Or in the case of the forest kingdom, you finally build a castle. It feels somewhat like playing a resource managing RTS, only without any real form of opponent. In fact there’s nothing that will impede your progress through the story, aside from the time required to actually harvest wood, stone and so on. A lot of time will be spent just standing around waiting for the Keflings to haul stuff to the workshops, especially in the early stages. Fortunately you can gather materials yourself and have some underlings to help you lug building pieces around, but sometimes I felt like the game could do with a little speed boost.
Your adventure begins in a frozen wasteland, home to the indigenous Kefkimos. Little by little you’ll construct homes and workshops for the little guys, granting you access to new workshops and other buildings, until you’re given a broken-off piece of some kind of portal that will allow you to travel to the next kingdom. The forest kingdom, specifically. Which is where you’ll be spending the bulk of your time as it’s both the largest of the three domains and has the most extensive selection of buildings to slap together. Eventually you’ll gain access to the third and final kingdom in the desert, but it’s noticeably smaller than the forest and will most likely take you less than an hour to fully complete.
On the subject of time, as I’m sure there are those out there who are overly concerned with it, A World of Keflings took me roughly six hours to “complete.” And by complete I mean “finally build the castle,” which is the main goal of the game. There are still some other buildings I haven’t constructed yet, and there’s a lot of talk about customizing your worlds, but the main “storyline” is finished. Assuming you really enjoy personalizing your stuff, you could probably spend several hours more adjusting the placement of your buildings and using the paint shop to give them a new look, but the majority of players will probably be done with it once The King Without a Castle finally becomes The King With a Castle.
If all of this makes A World of Keflings sound boring, well, that depends on your specific tastes. What some may see as “boring,” I see as “laid-back.” It’s a relaxing game with no clocks to beat or trials to overcome, instead focusing on a steady (very steady) system of constant progression. As you build and help various Keflings with their problems you’ll be able to acquire more Keflings to speed up the gathering process, unlock new abilities for your giant (such as being able to carry more stuff) , find more large Keflings to act as lackeys and occasionally find special items you can use to improve your kingdoms. It’s not exactly exciting, but it’s constantly rewarding you with new stuff.
Multiplayer doesn’t really do much to make the game more exciting, but it does add a social element that’s bound to make things a little more interesting. It’s exactly like you’re playing the single player game, only with multiple people. Each player can set their own blueprints and start producing stuff, which will allow you to create a very large kingdom very fast if you all work together. It even supports local multiplayer with a rather ingenious split-screen that adjusts itself based on your character’s relative location to your friend’s; going from horizontal to vertical to non-existent as you both wander around. If nothing else, it’s nice to have more hands to lug stuff around the map. And you’ll have people to talk to while you play, which is always nice.
One thing everyone should be able to agree on is that A World of Keflings is freaking adorable. The Keflings you’ll be speaking to seem to use a bizarre hybrid of Simlish and helium as a language. You won’t understand a thing they say without the subtitles, but it’ll sound cute regardless. Even, no, especially the witch. Her ominous witch cackle is sickeningly cute. And she’s so tiny!
Ultimately A World of Keflings isn’t a drastic improvement over the first game, but it does offer more to do and a larger game world to do it in. It’s not exactly an exciting game, in any way, but there’s plenty to find as you work your way towards finally putting that castle together. And you can build a robot. I like robots.
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Things We Liked: A near-constant sense of progression. Lots of stuff to make. The Keflings are Adorable with a capitol “A.”
Things We Disliked: No real conflict or opposition. There’s absolutely nothing exciting in this game. Many of the jokes fall flat. The relaxed pace almost had me nodding off a few times.
Target Audience: Resource management enthusiasts and people who like a good, relaxed game. And fans of the original, obviously.
(A World of Keflings – Developer: NinjaBee. Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios. Available for Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade. A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for review purposes. Unfamiliar with CFD!’s review system? Read our newly revised explanation here.)
