Pocket Kingdoms review: an empire for one thumb
A full strategy game in 20 minutes, for $12 and with no shop. Weak opponents hold it back.
Strategy games on a phone usually fail in one of two ways. Either they are a desktop game with buttons too small for a thumb, or they are a shop with a game attached. Pocket Kingdoms is neither. It costs $12, it has no shop, and it fits an empire into the time it takes to ride six stops on the metro.
We played it for three weeks, on a phone and on a handheld.
How it plays
You rule a small kingdom on a map of 37 tiles. Each turn, you take exactly three actions: build, move or trade. Then the other kingdoms do the same. A full game is 30 turns and takes about 20 minutes.
Three actions are very few, and this is where the game gets its depth. You want to build a farm, train a soldier, send a merchant and repair a wall. You can do three. Every turn is a small, clear choice, and there is no turn in which you just press "next".
There are five kingdoms to play, and each breaks one rule. The River Folk can build on water. The Ash Clans lose no soldiers in winter. The Glass Court can see two turns of the enemy's plans. We liked the Hollow Bank best: it cannot fight at all, and it wins by lending money to everybody else.
Made for a thumb
The screen design is the best we have seen in a mobile strategy game. Every button is in the lower third of the screen. You tap a tile, and its three possible actions appear in a half circle under your thumb. You never need two hands.
You can stop at any moment. Close the game in the middle of a turn, open it two days later, and it shows a summary of the last three turns in one sentence each. We wish every game did this.
The campaign
The campaign has 40 maps and a light story about a kingdom that shrinks each time you win. It takes about 15 hours. The early maps teach the rules well. The last ten maps are a real test, and map 37 took us four evenings.
After the campaign, there is a daily map, the same for every player in the world, with a list of the best scores. It is a good reason to open the game each morning.
Our test was a bus stop. If you could not play a useful turn between two stops, we cut the feature.
Minh Anh Tran, designer at Small Hours
Where it falls short
The computer opponents are weak at the start and unfair at the end. On the two highest of the five difficulty levels, they do not get smarter. They get more gold each turn. You can see it happen, and it feels cheap in a game that is otherwise so honest.
Online play is limited too. You can play against one friend, and each turn is sent when it is ready, like a game by post. There are no games against strangers, and no games with more than two people. For a game about five kingdoms, that is a real gap.
We also found the sound thin. There are four pieces of music, and each is 90 seconds long. After a week, we played with the sound off.
| What we liked | What we did not like |
|---|---|
| Three actions a turn: every choice matters | Computer opponents get gold, not brains |
| Perfect controls for one thumb | Online play for two people only |
| No shop, no timers, one price | Four short pieces of music |
| A full game in 20 minutes | Little to do after the campaign except the daily map |
On a handheld
The handheld version is the same game with larger text. It runs at 120 frames per second and uses almost no battery: we got more than six hours on a Volt Deck. It plays well with the sticks, but it was made for touch, and you feel that.
Scores
- Gameplay: 8.4
- Controls: 9.2
- Campaign: 7.6
- Online: 5.4
- Sound: 5.8
- Value: 8.0
Verdict
Pocket Kingdoms is a smart, honest strategy game that respects the device it is on and the person who holds it. Weak opponents at high levels and thin online play keep it out of the top class. At $12 and with no shop, it is easy to recommend to anyone with a commute.
