Kingdom Shell Guest Review By GamesGuru1

The following review for Kingdom Shell, is a guest review by GamesGuru1 aka Del. At Complete Xbox, we always welcome your views, and we love to share and promote them within the wider gaming community.

First Impressions

Ahhhhhh pixels, pixels, pixels. If you’re a child of the 80s and 90s and lived through the 16-Bit era of good ol’ cartridge based console gaming, then this is a game is for you. On surface value the game seems like a straightforward platform fantasy adventure. However, as you play and delve deeper you quickly discover a challenging but satisfying title underneath the cute, pixellated world that offers hours of exploration, discovery and entertainment.

Plot

The plot is your typical ‘Save the world from a returning ancient evil’ kinda trope. Which is fine, however nothing out of the ordinary fantasy style story spectacle. The Kingdom (it has no other name), has been protected for centuries by a magical item called the Shell of Kingdom. This is shattered in the opening cinematic, and the magical barrier protecting all within has fallen, allowing hordes of monsters and other demons to overrun the lands, destroying all in their path. The only remaining defence is the ancient order of The White Temple, who have valiantly protected the Kingdom from threats, but have now been overwhelmed by the encroaching evil and cannot stand against it alone. So they turn to help from our player character, a half-blood demon called Elias in their darkest hour, whom they let out from confinement to help, in return for his full release.

What follows is a platformer-type R.P.G. with Elias exploring the lands of the Kingdom, fighting the hordes of darkness along with several unique bosses. All the while, collecting items, finding lost treasures, helping N.P.C. inhabitants and questing to find a way to save the Kingdom.

Gameplay Overwiew

Before starting a new game, I always check out the menu options. In this case, the game’s ‘Configuration’ menu is simplistic, only enabling you to change the Music and Sound volume, Language and customize your controller button layout. However it’s nice that you can remap your controls at any time for the usual ‘Jump’, ‘Attack’, ‘Dodge’, etc in the menu system if the current configuration isn’t working for you gameplay wise.

There’s only two difficulty settings, which are ‘Easy’ and ‘Normal’ with no New Game+ option to unlock so once the game is done, it’s done.

Once the game gets underway your quest will take you all over the Kingdom, with plenty of mysteries, secrets and hidden places to uncover. People living in the land might also have their own side quests to offer for items and money to be used at shops and vendors. Here you’ll find new, upgrades, Inspirations, spells and new abilities to aid your journey.

For the most part, you fight enemies in a similar style to classic Zelda-esque games, with a combination of attacks, spells and combos, with the use of rolling to avoid attacks. The monster variety is substantial and they respawn when you leave and return to an area. Some of the bosses are clever and challenging, each needing a different strategy to beat and attack patterns to master. With trickier, secret optional bosses to uncover too. Defeating a boss usually unlocks a new magic or key item that you’ll need to continue the game.

To help with navigation, you have a map from your menu screen you can access at any time which unlocks as you explore. Handily enough, you can scale the map to add and remove tags to areas you want to revisit later on. This helps with finding your way back for quests and inaccessible areas that you couldn’t originally get to before gaining a new spell, skill or key.

Money can be found in conveniently placed chests, broken pottery and looted from dead monsters on your travels and can be used to buy Nectar from vendors which replenishes your health, as well as other unique quest items.

The levelling system is all crafted around what is called ‘Inspirations’. Inspirations are perks that can be found, bought from vendors or gained from dead boss monsters. You can ‘slot’ these into Elias’ skill tree via Mnemona’s Ribbons which are scattered throughout the land. They act like game modifiers, granting additional abilities or gameplay bonuses. While on the subject of Mnemona’s Ribbons, these also act as points were you can save your game and, eventually, to unlock a ‘Teleport’ feature to jump around the ever increasing map too.

Presentation

As mentioned earlier, the game straight away, comes across looking like something straight from classic 16-Bit console era cartridges (remember those), this action-adventure-platform game oozes pixellated goodness. Despite this being a game from a smaller studio, Cup Of Pixels, and showing it’s small Indie heritage, the quality of the graphics which are a mixture of hand-drawn pixel art and animation techniques, shine through and suit the type of game this is. With lovely, varied scrolling background and little features like whisps of wind and small shrubs rustling to make the lands look more alive and vibrant. You can tell the developers took their time crafting the world and lore in detail. Primarily a text based adventure, there’s no actually spoken dialogue which might put off more modern gamers who expect all adventure games to have full voice acting for each and every character and N.P.C. but in this regard, since the game is going for the old retro style, it fits the aesthetic nicely.

The game is primarily a side scrolling adventure game, harking back to the classic Wonder Boy titles of old, with a bit of ‘Metroidvania’ platforming and to-ing and fro-ing backtracking thrown in for good measure. However, the game only scrolls parts of the areas, then flips from area to area. This initially can be quite jarring but manageable when you get used to it. Slight niggle tho is that often, you have to drop down parts of the levels without knowing were to land or what’s at the bottom, leading too all too many ‘leaps of faith’ were you just have to hope you don’t land on an enemy or spikes or something!

The soundtrack is calm and serene for the most part and each boss encounter has its own piece of music, which is a nice touch. Each area you visit on your travels has its own score and unique monsters and creatures to battle. The hit detection however can be, shall we say, very hit and miss tho. Especially on the flying variety of foes you encounter. Often leading to frustration and falls from small platforms to your demise.

The Bottom Line

In conclusion, Kingdom Shell is a quaint little adventure title that has a lot going for it. From the art style, interesting characters, a world that is well animated with a level design that is robust and serviceable. It’s not big budget, flashy or expansive, however it definitely fits in the ‘charming’ category of platforming games and has enough going for it to ensure that this gamer will be playing the game to completion long after this review is done and published.

Priced at the relatively cheap £11.99 at the time of writing this review, if you’ve got a few spare quid handy and wondering what to play next until they remaster another Metroid game, then I can recommend giving Kingdom Shell a go. Try it, you might just like it.

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