The articlegameplay, story, development, reception
Gameplay
Kingdom Two Crowns is a 2D strategy and resource management game presented from a side-scrolling perspective. Players control a mounted monarch who must build their kingdom and defend it from the Greed, a race of monsters. Gameplay takes place across a day–night cycle, the monarch exploring and building during the day and fighting the Greed at night. Expansion is facilitated by spending gold coins, which the monarch collects and stores inside a bag.
Camps where the monarch can spend coins to hire new subjects are located outside the kingdom. Once recruited, villagers remain idle until the monarch buys equipment for them, leading them to perform a specific job. Typical hires include builders who clear land and construct defenses, farmers who grow crops for gold, and archers who hunt animals for coins and attack enemies.
Development
Kingdom Two Crowns was developed by the Kingdom franchise creator Thomas "Noio" van den Berg and British game studio Coatsink. The game was originally intended to be an expansion pack for Kingdom: New Lands (2016), an updated version of the 2015 video game Kingdom. As the expansion grew and experienced delays, the designers chose to develop it as a new game. In contrast to the other Kingdom games, Two Crowns was mainly designed by a co-founder of Raw Fury, Gordon Van Dyke, with van den Berg acting as a creative director.
Both developers wanted to create a new experience focused on defending structures instead of "defeating and escaping". They were inspired by the narrative of Infinity Blade (2010) to reduce the difficulty of the original Kingdom's roguelike design. As a result, the developers allowed the player to keep most of their buildings after losing their crown, believing that it would encourage them to keep playing.
Reception
According to the review aggregate website Metacritic, the Switch version of Kingdom Two Crowns received "generally favorable reviews". Critics frequently praised the strategic elements of gameplay. Nintendo World Report called the game a worthy sequel to Kingdom, and recommended it to fans of the strategy genre; Push Square and Pocket Tactics described its mechanics as simple and well-designed. GameStar praised the minimalism in how the monarch was controlled, and found its strategy elements to be "amazingly complex". Other critics considered the game substantially similar to Kingdom: New Lands, but said that it was generally better in comparison.
Critics praised the introduction of co-op, feeling it made the gameplay easier. Nintendo Life considered co-op a helpful addition, but said players may feel like they were gaming the system after performing worse on their own. Nintendo World Report noted that adding a second monarch allowed players to split their attention between several areas, calling it a powerful and creative enhancement. GameRevolution said that the cooperative mode encouraged players to win in an "exploitative way", and undermined the original Kingdom's atmosphere by forcing the player to adopt an overly strategic approach. The reviewer felt that allowing monarchs to share tasks removed the stress of gameplay, which he believed was central to the appeal of the franchise.
