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Kingdom Eightiestakes themedieval micro-strategy seriesto a new age, the nostalgic 1980s. Equipped with nothing but a sack of coins, your bike, and a crown, you’ll have to fight off the Greed and save your town!
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Veterans of the Kingdom series will feel right at home with this game, since gameplay is nearly identical to previous entries with a few twists to keep it interesting. Newbies can pick it up pretty easily as well, since it has a decent tutorial. However, managing a modern Kingdom under siege isn’t always easy or clear cut, so here are some tips to help you keep the Greed at bay.
Venture Beyond Your Borders Carefully
It’s tempting to explore the world outside of your camp immediately, since it’s an interesting setting and your goals aren’t always immediately clear. However, it’s important toestablish some basic necessitiesandslowly expand your borders.
First,recruit nearby kids and buy hammers and bowsso they can defend your camp and be ready to build your walls.
Then,build walls (on orange traffic cones)so that you can slowly expand your territory.Chop down trees for moneyand to open up new territory for you to expand to.
While you may scout beyond your borders,turn around once you see a Portal. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of it when it starts spawning enemies.
Generally, you canonly interact with buildings and chore areas if they’re behind an established wall. Walls can only be built if the area near a traffic cone is clear of trees.
Always Be Busy
The more days pass, the tougher your enemies get, so you want toget your goals done as quickly as possible, especially since it’s not always immediately clear what they are.
Though the tutorial would have you watch structures erected or jobs get done, you’re actuallyfree to initiate most tasks and leave for them to get sorted.
Unless you’re broke,you don’t need to wait for coins to be producedsince any money made will either be picked up by another kid and given to you when you get near them, or stay on the ground.
That is, unless they’re picked up by the Greed, but if they’re that far in your business, thenyou have a different problem.
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Boosting Basics
You canboost (LT, L2, Shift) to move faster, which is useful for getting around your domain quickly. However, it has its limits. If you stay boosted for too long,you’ll get tired, as indicated by a heavy breathing animation.
Push it any further, andyou’ll stop in place, which is especially bad if you’re being chased.Try not to get exhausted in dangerous areaslike near portals or outside your camp at night.
The best way to recover quickly is to stop movingand, if you’re not in danger, you’ll do a little recovery animation that varies between steeds,after which you’ll be back to full stamina.
You’ll find different vehicles throughout the game, and they all have different speeds and, more importantly,different boost abilities. You usually activate these bypressing the boost button multiple times.
Some vehicles don’t have the heavy breathing animation, butyou can still run out of stamina. They havea different animation to show that you’re running out of steam.
The Skies Tell You The Time
Moving around in daytimeis your best betfor not running into any Greed, since they’re active at night. However, you don’t really get a timer to tell you how long days or nights are going to be.
But,if you look at the sky, the sun and moon travel left to right.So when the sun reaches the right side, it means that night has fallen and the opposite is true if the moon does.
In forested areas, this is harder to see, sobe especially mindful when you go into unsettled lands.
Also, if enemies are especially strong or attacking because you’re doing an objective,this is signaled by a red moon or an eclipsed sun, with red skies in either case.
Tower Defense
When Wiz joins your crew, you gain access topowerful defensive towers. Wiz canbuild them on stepladdersthat you’ll find on the map and Tinker canupgrade them with scrap armorthat turns them into walls.
The relevant character cannot act while they are working on a tower, which meansWiz won’t operate his siege robot and Tinker won’t run over enemies or repair the dumpster if they’re working on a tower.
If you upgrade your main building enough, yougain the ability to specialize your towers. This is done by interacting with the TV’s near towers, which will change between three icons, an angled line and an arced line.
The angled line turns the tower into a long-range sniper towerandthe arced line turns it into an even longer-ranged mortar.
By default, they’reshorter ranged and faster firing, and you canchange them back by selecting the fat bulletwhen it shows up on the TV.
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Don’t Hoard Your Coins
Coins are the driving resource in Kingdom Eighties, fueling not only your offense and defense, but alsoevery non-movement action.
You might want to be thrifty with them, especially since some upgrades are expensive. Butif your sack is over three-quarters full, you’re probably overdoing it.
There’s always something to spend your coins on, and, usually,those things produce more coins in the long run. If not, then you get other things like different steeds or forward progress in the story.
If you’re particularly egregious with your hoarding, you’re able to actually lose money.Your sack can overflow, which causes coins to spill in the water.There is, however, an achievement for losing 80 coins in the water and this is the less risky way to do it.
Arrows Show The Stage Goal
Kingdom games have a tendency of leaving you to figure out what to do next or even what your goals are. Kingdom Eighties isn’t as bad as its predecessors, but sometimes it can leave you confused about what to do.
Ultimately,going the wrong way can be quite rewarding, since you’re able to find a lot of neat things that aren’t necessary for your goals.
But if you want to just get going,look for an arrow. Aside from the first level where your goal is clear, you can usually find an arrow on the map that willgive you a hint about which end of the map your win condition lies.
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