A World of Keflings Review
A World of Keflings Review
By BrutishBatfink
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Your guide to building an Autocratic utopia… the cuddly kind.
One saying I heard a lot growing up is that size doesn’t matter. Well, that isn’t true here as in A World of Keflings size means everything. You see, your Xbox avatar is taller than everyone else in this world. So very, very tall. And that kind of stature is going to be very much in demand.
As the title implies, A World of Keflings is a resource management game set in a cute medieval-like world inhabited by little people called keflings. Think the Settlers games crossed with something out of the Disney Channel and you wouldn’t be far off. The landscape itself is a sandbox environment full of resources that you and your keflings collect and hoard in order to build a wide variety of buildings.
The keflings that inhabit this world are a simple folk who simply adore you because of your giant-like stature and thus feel compelled to ask for your help with everything. And I mean everything. How they ever survived before you showed up is anyone’s guess.
Progress through the game is generally made by constructing their little utopia for them. Collecting enough resources enables them to meet the requirements needed to build various buildings or to complete certain side quests.
Succeeding in these side quests will often reward you with things like a new building blueprint, a new tool that allows you to mine for a new type of resource that you couldn’t before or a stat upgrade for your avatar so that he or she can carry more resources, move faster and the like.
However you dress it all up, these side tasks are accomplished by just simple resource gathering. This might sound mundane and boring, but A World of Keflings is just so cute in how it plays that even the most jaded player will not be able to resist its charms.
Seriously, the game can be totally captivating as you watch your city take shape with cute buildings popping up everywhere and seeing the little buggers dance around your feet as they wait for you to order them to do some manual labor. Oh, how they love to work and dance the dance of life.
Your kefling followers will aid you in building your utopia by gathering the resources you need (wood, wool, crystals, stone etc.) and transporting them to various buildings for use in producing more useful resources for you (cloth, magic potions and such) that will aid you in building more complex buildings. But they won’t do it off their own backs. No, they have to be taught and guided.
Guiding a kefling is simple. You just pick one up take it to the resource you want collected and then carry him or her over to where you want the resource to be dropped off to, and that’s all it takes.
They will keep doing their given task forever; no questions asked, no unions getting involved, no complaints. Ahhh… paradise. I imagine this is what communist Russia must have looked like in its heyday with everyone working towards the good of the state, minus the kooky music.
As you progress with the construction of your city, you will be able to build bigger and more advanced structures like a castle and keep. These endgame buildings will require some prior planning on your part due to the their size and the logistics of getting all the pieces together, but they are very rewarding to construct.
So after a few hours of careful resource management you should end up with a sprawling utopia of little people running around doing your bidding where everyone has a job to do and everyone knows their place in the community. Many will find the pace relaxing, while other more hardcore gamers won’t see the point of it at all.
With no overall goal other than to grow your city, you could if you wanted to just leave the game running for hours on end with your keflings taking every last resource and following your last instruction without question. You still need to do the actual building of course, but even so this may still bore gamers who are looking for something a bit more engaging.
A World of Keflings is a welcome sequel to the original. With differently themed levels and weird side quests to pursue, it adds just enough to make the game feel refreshing when compared to its predecessor.
Overall it’s a fun game that’s nothing too taxing or complicated. It’s the sort of game you will play to wind down with after a stressful day at work, with its charm and laid back music providing the perfect amount of escapism. It’s just a shame there isn’t something to keep you coming back once you have built everything.
Overall:
8/10
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Developer: NinjaBee
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Players: 1-4 (offline and online multiplayer)
Release: 22nd December, 2010
Initial Price: 800 Microsoft points
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