A great example of how to use the GamePad in a strategy game, but not much else.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/39158/a-world-of-keflings-review
Strategy games are a genre that is often underserved on consoles, but have often been seen as something the Wii U GamePad’s touch screen could be useful for. A World of Keflings is a game that realizes some of that potential, but is held back in other areas.
The game stars you, in the form of your Mii, as a giant in a world of small creatures called Keflings. You are called upon by the leader of their group to manage their city by harvesting resources and using them to create buildings, increasing your population and capabilities along the way. You can walk around, pick things up and arrange them as you see fit. Pick up a Kefling and place it on a resource spot, such as stone or wood, and it will start collecting it, then pick it up again and place it on a building to have it take that resource there. The Keflings will keep doing that until you tell them to do something else, which allows you to multitask.
Over time you’ll end up with large numbers of these creatures in your group at one time, and this can be problematic. One significant issue is that it can be hard at times to line yourself up properly to grab a Kefling or an item. You can end up with a Kefling, a resource spot, and another item all close to one another, and it will often take multiple attempts to get in the right position to select the one you want.
Each Kefling allows you to collect more resources, which can be combined to produce buildings, which can be used to process other resources and produce components for new buildings. This process can be fairly complex, but the game does a good job of explaining things as you go. Almost too good, even, as it sometimes feels too linear, where you’re doing one thing just to do the next thing, and on and on. You don’t often have more than two options for how to proceed at a time, and in most of those cases you’re just choosing which of the two to do first.
The game has a fairly charming aesthetic, with an art style that’s just the right level of cartoony and a script that can be fairly funny at times, though not as funny as it thinks it is. There’s often far more cutesy text than the situation would seem to call for. The characters don’t have much depth, but they don’t need to.
As you might expect from a game like this, the GamePad screen is put to very good use. You can tap on any of the buildings on the map to pull up their production menu, and right from there queue up components to be built, which your helper characters will helpfully bring to where you are. This makes the process of building new structures much more streamlined, which is very nice, but it comes at the expense of the game not being able to be played Off-TV, which, for a game that really feels like something to be played while doing something else, is a major blow.
The biggest issue I have is that it sometimes feels like it’s artificially slow. The more Keflings you have, the more things you can do at once and the faster you can proceed. But you can only build houses, which is how you increase your population, when you have hearts to put in them, and the game doesn’t give you those very often. It can sometimes feel like there were originally microtransactions in it that expanded those capabilities but got ripped out.
This is a game that makes a really good first impression, but doesn’t really evolve that much, which made me like it less and less as I went on. After a certain point it just feels like going through the motions, building X to get Y so you can build Z. While it’s a great first step toward compelling use of the GamePad in a strategy title, the mechanics never really develop enough to fully realize it.
Topic: A World of Keflings Review (Read 2162 times)
