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It’s been just about a year since Kingmakers, the game about bringing a gun to a knife fight, was delayed just ahead of its planned launch, and we’ve heard nothing about it since. Today developer Redemption Road finally broke that extended silence with a new “deep dive” trailer detailing everything players will be doing in the game, and also opened the door to signups for an upcoming playtest.
First things first: I would be remiss if I didn’t at least acknowledge the awkward cinematic interludes. They’re really not great, and all I can say is that hopefully they’re just bits of exposition built specifically for the trailer and not actually part of the game.
That aside, there’s a lot going on here. Fighting large numbers of hopelessly outclassed enemies is still the central hook in Kingmakers, but you’re also going to be leading armies on a strategic scale, building and managing settlements, and collecting resources so you can buy better equipment.
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I’m really not sure how I feel about all that. Rolling into Bannockburn behind the wheel of a Leopard 2 has obvious appeal, but do I really want to be worrying about placing farms and erecting fortifications when I could be punching 120mm HEAT-sized holes in some peasant’s hovel? But on the other side of that coin, what happens when the novelty of ‘you have a sword, I have a SAW’ wears off? Sooner or later it might be nice to have other things to do, especially if you’re the kind of gamer who occasionally asks questions like, ‘Why am I in Bannockburn with a Leopard 2?’
(The famous Battle of Bannockburn, for the record, does not actually feature in Kingmakers, which is about assisting Welsh nobleman Owain Glyndŵ in his 1403 uprising against the English.)
If you have similar questions about how the full Kingmakers experience will compare to the initial bonkersness of its 2024 reveal, the Kingmakers playtest may be a way to find answers, or at least get an early feel for which way it’s headed. Go to the Steam page, mash the playtest signup button, and when (or if, I suppose) the time comes you’ll receive an email notifying you that you’re in.
One thing that isn’t included in today’s video, sorry to say, is a new release date—Kingmakers is still listed on Steam as “coming soon.”
