Total War Battles: Kingdom - If you build it, you'll probably have to fight over it

Total War Battles: Kingdom has a pretty unwieldy name, but interestingly it's the fourth word that's the one you need to focus on.

There's war here, but it's not exactly total. And there are battles, but they're not at the core of the game.

It's kingdom building that takes centre stage here. You're flattening out the land, harvesting crops, mining rocks, chopping down trees, building roads, and making sure there are enough houses and slums for your population to live in.

Yes, there are scraps, and they're more interactive than your usual free to play city building, but it's building, infrastructure, and God-like terraforming that you'll spend most of your time doing.

And you know what, it's actually really bloody good.

It's a city builder then?

Well there's city building involved, but it's a lot more complex than that. You're not just putting buildings within some walls and trying to defend yourself. You're trying to take over the world, nudging out rivals with force or arms or reputation.

And it's not just buildings you're placing. You need to make the roads to connect the different parts of your ever-growing realm.

You need to build dams to take back land, bridge rivers to connect towns, and cut down trees to clear land and gain building materials.

Everything is controlled with taps. Tap a woodcutter to open up some options, choose what you'd like to do, then tap the area you'd like to do it in. It takes a while to complete any action, and while it's happening you get to look at a green bar filling up.

But there's never a point in the game where you feel like you haven't got anything to do. Set all of your workers at a task and you can dive into one of the combat missions. These see you leading your army into skirmishes.

They're not easy though. You need to build up an impressive array of soldiers, and learn which troop types fare better against which. The early scraps are reasonably sedate, but they get much tougher.

You have control over the placement of your troops to some extent, and there are QTE-style actions that let you perfect your charges. Churches give you different buffs and boosts, and you unlock more of these as you play.

There are cavalry units, archers, siege engines, and more to unlock. But, as you might expect, they take time to unlock. In a way though, that makes building your army all the more interesting.

It's like leading a force from a ramshackle group of peasants with pitchforks all the way to an impressive unit wearing crafted armour and waving fearsome weapons around.

Well, this all sounds rather exciting

It is pretty exciting. There's a level of polish here that puts a lot of other games on the App Store to shame. Seriously, sometimes it's fun just to swipe around the lands you've conquered and look at them. Really look at them.

It might not be the fully featured RTS that Total War fans have been wishing for, but there's so much to do here that it's almost impossible not to get swept by the sheer size of the task that it sets you.

Total War Battles: Kingdom - If you build it, you'll probably have to fight over it

Total War Battle: Kingdoms is a bit of a mouthful, but when it gives you so much to do it's hardly a surprise it takes a while to say its name
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Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.