Review: A World of Keflings (XBLA)

An all new Ice Kingdom is rather nice. See what I did there... with the rhyming and ship. (Keeping it PG)

A World of Keflings is the newest game from NinjaBee, the studio that brought us Outpost Kaloki X, Cloning Clyde, Band of Bugs, and of course, A Kingdom for Keflings. If you can't already tell, A World of Keflings is the sequel to A Kingdom for Keflings and now I will state the obvious: If you enjoyed Kingdom, you are going to enjoy World.

World is essentially the same game as Kingdom, but now you get two new worlds -- an Ice Kingdom and a Desert Kingdom -- in addition to the Forest Kingdom and new features, like more emotes than you could ever need. There isn't any drastic change to the formula, so your opinion of Kingdom will help you determine if you want to purchase World more than anything.

I can promise that my Avatar is a much snazzier dresser!

If you never played Kingdom, I'll break down the fundamentals of these little Keflings games. You take the role of a giant, who happens to be your Avatar, and you must help the Keflings by gathering resources and building blueprints. You can "force" Keflings to gather resources -- you level keflings up by smacking them on the head -- to make things easier (and faster) and your only real goal is to create every building in the game. If you enjoy gathering resources and resource management, you are going to enjoy either Keflings game.

One of my favorite aspects of World is the humor; something I don't remember from Kingdom. There is one character, who I'll let you meet on your own, that delivers jokes similar to the barrage of Chuck Norris jokes from years ago and it filled me with a fit of glee. Besides the humorous dialogue, you can still kick all your little Keflings and even shoot them out of cannons, which they seem to enjoy.

It's hard for me to review this game when it is so similar in nature to the original, but if you want more Keflings fun and aren't looking for some kind of amazing innovation, you will likely be satisfied. World features both online and offline multiplayer and leaderboards for the obsessive compulsive. I loved my time with World and I don't want to give anything away, but this may very well be my favorite game in the Games for the Holidays promotion.

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*Disclaimer: I ran into somewhat of a game-ending bug -- more so of an end-prevention bug -- and I'm in talks with the developers on figuring out a workaround and/or a fix for this issue. I am basically missing one blueprint that I can't get and there's no current solution to my problem. It is my belief that this was caused by the fact I didn't build all the blueprints before sending the princess to another kingdom (she will never come back to the Forest Kingdom post-departure). I will post an update as soon as a fix goes live, or a work around is found, but until that happens I will say this: Do not send the princess to the Desert Kingdom until you have built all available blueprints. I do not know if this is the cause of my issue, but it is currently the most likely cause. With all that said, this didn't take away from my enjoyment of the game and I hope it doesn't scare you away from purchasing this great game.