We all love a little city builder around here, right? Course we do! But I’m sure not all of our friends do, they’d rather be off hacking and slashing and other such brutish things. KingFish, then, might present a pleasant opportunity to bring you and said friend together, for it is both a city builder and an action game, where one of you gets to do the building, while the other gets to do the fighting.
Well, sort of anyway, the split isn’t quite so even, but we’ll get into that in a moment. Let’s touch on the title for a moment. One of you plays as the King; this is the person who runs around on the back of the Fish, a giant living island, gathering up resources, slicing and dicing both trees and enemies alike, as well as listens to the needs of the citizens. The Fish, the aforementioned living island, is the eye in the sky who plans where each bit of your city (or I suppose kingdom) goes and offers help from above.
The reason the gameplay split isn’t so even is that the King does have to get involved and help with the building, they’re the one that has to gather the resources for one. But the Fish can also help out in combat and keep an eye out for incoming enemies while the King might be busy off doing something else.
This is where some tower defence elements appear to come into play, but it is also a roguelike. With this comes different maps, mechanics and challenges, though the game’s Steam page doesn’t get more specific than that for the city building. For the King, at least, there does appear to be the option of choosing which citizens join your kingdom, all of which have their own abilities. These might be helping to build things or to fight enemies, that sort of thing.
I do wonder if having two quite distinct playstyles will mean that neither of them are as fleshed out as they could be. Right now it seems perhaps a smidge underbaked in places. I do think there’s some neat potential hiding in there somewhere, and actually playing it might feel different. No release date attached to this one outside of sometime in 2027. You can wishlist it on Steam for now.
