Crownhold

Idle/Incremental Prestige - Yes, Only needed to prestige 1 or 2 times Active Play - You'll need to be mostly active. Visuals - City and region grows over time, "people" walk around. Special Mechanics - Game Evolves well Cash Shop - None This is a pretty good colony builder/idle/incremental. The game evolves well and keeps adding in stuff without it getting too complicated. My only complaint is it grows too quickly from small town to empire. More time could have been spent building up.

There are times when the easiest way to explain how much I enjoyed a game is simply to tell you what happened. I started Crownhold. Fourteen hours later, I'd unlocked every achievement, discovered every item, fully upgraded everything I could find and completed pretty much every last thing the game gave me to do. I also recorded the entire 14 hours of gameplay and, by the end of it, had managed to make my voice rather croaky. So yes... I enjoyed Crownhold. 😂 👑 At its heart, Crownhold is an incremental game about developing your own kingdom while dealing with the slight inconvenience of another kingdom deciding it would rather you didn't exist. You begin relatively modestly, gathering resources and developing your kingdom, but gradually more and more of the game opens up. New buildings become available, upgrades improve what you can already do, new areas of the map are revealed and eventually the military side becomes increasingly important as you unlock new units and find ways to strengthen your army. It's exactly the sort of progression I enjoy in an incremental game. There's nearly always something else on the horizon. "I'll just get enough resources for this building." Then that building reveals something else. "Well, I'll unlock that before I stop." Then another upgrade becomes affordable. Fourteen hours later, apparently I'm still sitting there. That part of Crownhold worked extremely well for me. 🏰 Building the kingdom was probably my favourite part of the experience. I enjoyed seeing things gradually expand and watching previously unavailable parts of the game become accessible. Unlocking another building or opening a new area felt meaningful because it usually gave me something else to work towards rather than simply increasing a number for the sake of increasing it. The military progression added another layer later on. Once my army became more important, there were new units to discover and another upgrade system dedicated to strengthening them. I actually found this side of the progression considerably more enjoyable than one of Crownhold's other major mechanics: Prestige. And this is where Crownhold and I had a few disagreements. 🔄 I normally enjoy prestige systems in incremental games. Resetting progress in exchange for something that makes the next run faster or allows you to develop in a different direction can create a fantastic progression loop when it's handled well. Crownhold's prestige system gives you access to another skill tree and therefore does provide permanent benefits, but I never completely fell in love with the way it was implemented. Prestiging doesn't simply throw you all the way back to the very beginning. Instead, you're pushed partially backwards, retaining some elements while having to rebuild and repeat others. It took some getting used to. There were moments where it felt less like "Excellent, now I can become substantially more powerful" and more like "Right... I suppose I'm doing all of that again then." And because I wanted to completely finish the game and unlock every achievement, I ultimately needed to prestige five times. By the fifth one, I can't pretend I was leaping out of my chair shouting: "HOORAY! ANOTHER PRESTIGE!" I may have used slightly different words. 😂 For me, that system sometimes felt a little forced. I understand why it's there and the additional skill tree does give it purpose, but I don't think Crownhold particularly needed to lean on repeated prestige quite as heavily as it does. Interestingly, I had almost the opposite reaction to the separate progression system surrounding the army. ⚔️ Improving my forces felt much more natural to me. Unlocking units and finding ways to strengthen the army gave me another avenue of progression without creating that same feeling of having previously completed work placed back in front of me. I'd happily have taken even more of that. There is another thing potential players should know before jumping in: Crownhold can be a grind. There were periods where I was waiting for one resource, then another resource, then discovering that the next thing I wanted required yet another pile of something else. Sometimes that's simply incremental gaming. Waiting, improving production and gradually reaching numbers that initially looked enormous is part of why many of us play these games in the first place. But there were points during Crownhold where I felt the grind lasted slightly longer than it needed to. Combined with the repeated prestiging, there were certainly sections where progress slowed and I found myself revisiting things I'd already worked through. That didn't ruin the experience for me. Far from it. But I think it's important to mention because anyone buying Crownhold expecting constant rapid-fire progression may find some sections frustrating. There are times when you simply have to settle in, let the resources accumulate and work your way through it. ⏳ I've seen players mention completing Crownhold in somewhere around five to eight hours, and I can absolutely believe that's possible depending on how somebody approaches the game. That wasn't how I played it. When I really enjoy a game, I have a tendency to poke around in every corner and try to complete as much as possible. In Crownhold's case, I didn't merely want to reach an ending and declare myself finished. I wanted everything. Every achievement. Every item. Every unlock. Every upgrade. If there was something left unfinished, apparently my brain had decided we weren't leaving yet. Doing that took me approximately 14 hours from beginning to genuine 100% completion. Some of that additional time undoubtedly came from me simply taking my time and enjoying myself. Some came from my determination to complete absolutely everything. And yes, some of it came from the grind. But there's something rather important hidden inside those 14 hours: I kept playing. If the underlying game hadn't been enjoyable, I wouldn't have forced myself through fourteen hours simply to watch an achievement counter reach 100%. I wanted to see the next unlock. I wanted to strengthen the kingdom. I wanted the next building. I wanted to see what was hidden in the next area. And eventually I wanted to make absolutely certain that the kingdom which had decided sharing the world with me was unacceptable came to understand that this had been a rather poor strategic decision. 😄 👑 That's why, despite my complaints about the prestige system and some sections becoming more grindy than I think they needed to be, my overall feeling towards Crownhold is extremely positive. The incremental progression is satisfying, there's plenty to unlock, developing the kingdom continually gives you new targets to chase and the later military progression gives the game another enjoyable dimension. It also has something I particularly appreciate in incremental games: An achievable ending. You can actually finish Crownhold. You can see everything. You can reach that wonderful point where there are no achievements left, no mysterious item waiting to be discovered and no upgrade sitting there unfinished. For somebody like me, there's something enormously satisfying about being able to look at an incremental game after 14 hours and say: "Yep. I did the lot." 💜 Crownhold gets a full Tom Recommends from me. Just go into it knowing what you're signing up for. There will be periods where progress slows. There will be resources you find yourself waiting for. There will be things you need to repeat. And if you're chasing every achievement as I was, you and that prestige button are probably going to develop a somewhat complicated relationship. But underneath those frustrations is an incremental game that kept me entertained long enough to complete absolutely everything it offered. Fourteen hours, five prestiges, every achievement, every item, every upgrade and one increasingly croaky voice later...

This is a short, little, idle-lite game that took me roughly 8 hours to complete. Click to get gold, then use gold to get citizens whom you assign to automate different outputs, getting a larger array of tasks and outputs as your kingdom expands. End your run and apply prestige power-ups to make your next run easier and faster. I found three aspects of the game stood out to me in a positive way. I found the city growth to be visually pleasing. There's a neat warfare aspect to the game, which is still just 'make the numbers bigger,' but has some interesting parts to it. And last, there's a small little territory, vassalage part to the game, which again, is just plowed through with numbers. But, I thought the concepts were new, interesting, a would be a great foundation for a second game or to inspire future copycats. In short, it makes some neat attempts to expand the city-builder idle genre, and even if it fell a little flat, was fun to learn and use. Frankly, I can't complain for the price, but it did leave me wanting more. And, there was a forehead-smacking, massive missed opportunity for end-game content after defeating the boss, that I found disappointing. But overall, it was a fun ride for two evenings, and I'll likely go back and replay from scratch again at some point.

Very chill **** Edit: Wasn't aware AI was used in the making. Uncool.

the dev really needs to fix the lingering tabs from buildings when you purchase something, you cant just have upgrade menu's half the size of your screen and then also put two such cases next to eachother, where you have to travel half the world just to get rid of the menu to go into another menu that was suppose to be accessible right next to it. ill change my review once this is fixed but as of now, the game is more of a hastle than enjoyable with these ♥♥♥♥♥♥ menus, thought it wouldve been changed from the demo atleast

Simple enough game, if you've played an incremental game before you've basically played this. TL;DR: Will not recommend for the jankiness and poor balance; the late game severely drags on due to crazy scaling (500 billion stone for the cathedral final level? Seriously?) Literally could not complete the actual game due to the game no longer registering "clicks" on the enemy castle, I then saved to restart and try to come back, and subsequently bricked my entire run. Besides that, it's the technical jankiness; the SFX audio slider does not control the SFX for instance. Don't recommend.

Demo seemed interesting, so got the full game. The closer to the end, the more I've started to dislike it. * There are annoying visual elements which you can't ignore (block your screen, require additional actions to remove them) * There are several buffs that don't work correctly or at all * In the later stages you can get broken mechanics that kinda help you but shouldn't be there * Very grindy in the late game with nothing to do in the meantime - you just have to wait and you can't do anything about it * There are some balance issues and there is an unintended (my guess) cheese that allows you to exploit the resource gain ---------- On the bright side, music is nice, map changes as you buy improvements, plenty of moving stuff that makes it look alive. And dev has been pushing some fixes after release, so maybe some of the above points will be fixed as well. Also game is cheap and while in the end I can't say I liked it, it is okay for that price (got it with 15% discount on release).

Its a good idle game but to short, 8h hours to compete is not enough for me as idle game should take days or weeks to complete.