Westward’s hit series of time management adventure games is back with a fantasy twist in Westward Kingdoms! Exiled by their father the king for being spoiled brats, Prince Fenwick and Princess Catherine must prove their worth by helping neighboring kingdoms fend off evil monsters and build thriving cities and forts. Help the Prince and Princess become the roles they were born to play using your time and resource management skills!

Westward Kingdoms is the latest game from the creators of Westward, the hit series of old west themed time management adventure games. The concept and gameplay in Kingdoms is similar to the original series, but with a fantasy theme. You help kings defend their land from barbarians instead of protecting cowboy settlers from bandits and raiders. And instead of building canteens and train stations, this time you’ll need to build watchtowers and barracks.

You choose if you want to play as Prince Fenwick or Princess Catherine. At the beginning of the game, while you are busy acting pompous and enjoying the life of idle nobility, you receive a note from your father the king. Apparently he thinks you are too useless to be the heir to the throne and he has exiled you from the kingdom until you learn to be a good leader. Unable to show off your incredible management skills to the local peasants, you set off for foreign lands in search of kings and nobles who need your help.

If you have already played any of the Westward games, you will feel right at home with the controls and game mechanics. And due to its setting in a fantasy world, it bears more than a passing resemblance to one of the giants of the real-time strategy genre: Warcraft. You get a similar setup and resource management system, and you even get the funny quips and exclamations from your pawns every time you click on them, something any Warcraft player will remember fondly.

However, Westward Kingdoms is not the intense, action-packed game that Warcraft is famous for. Things happen at a slower pace here, and you can take your time to plan your next actions or just enjoy the scenery. Also, the focus here is not to create the most efficient city in resource and troop production. Rather, the game is a bit more like an adventure game, where your main character accepts quests to drive away bad guys from the kingdom or construct buildings to improve the local defense and economy. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with these types of games; the missions act as tutorials to slowly introduce you to all the mechanics of the game.

Most of the game revolves around building buildings, collecting resources, fighting bad guys, and hunting for treasure. Since you are royalty, many of these tasks are below you. Therefore, you need to find peasants and soldiers to do the work for you! Peasants are needed to do menial work, such as collecting building resources, as well as gold and food. Soldiers are needed to protect the land from bad guys, ranging from a single bored barbarian at the start of the game to dragons and other monsters as you gain more experience.

However, these peasants and soldiers don’t work for free (what happened to forced labor?) You will need to feed and house them. If there aren’t enough houses for the peasants, they will just sit around doing nothing. If there are not enough barracks, you will not be able to hire more soldiers, and your existing soldiers will only fight with half their strength. There are many other buildings such as the blacksmith, library and gold mine to build your kingdom into a military and economic powerhouse. These can be researched and built once the time is right and you have obtained the necessary resources.

This new game from Westward strays away from the gritty art style of the previous games. However, the bright and cartoony fantasy style is refreshing and works very well. The things the characters say are also funny. You’ll spend half the time laughing at the jokes and growling at the puns. And since this is a fantasy game, there’s a bit of magic involved as well. Do you have a damsel trapped on top of a tower with the entrance blocked? Just buy a magic bean from the merchant and grow a bean stalk to reach her! However, there is only one bad thing in the game. Moving a character requires you to click on the character, then hold and drag the cursor to where you want it to go. This is fine for short distances, but it gets cumbersome when you try to move them off screen.

That complaint aside, Westward Kingdoms is a fun and charming adventure as you embark on the age-old quest to save your fellow humans from harm and prove yourself. If you liked the previous Westward games or similar time and resource management games like Roads of Rome II, you’ll love Westward Kingdoms.

Rating: 4.0/5.0