The Kingdom franchise has long become a staple side-scrolling strategy game, if notthegame to define the genre. With Kingdom Two Crowns perfecting the medieval formula, the developers wanted to try their hand at a completely different setting that still ties into the franchise, leading to the creation of Kingdom Eighties, a nostalgic homage to life in the 80s. The game was launched for PC in June, and at Gamescom 2023, Raw Fury exclusively confirmed toAndroid Policethat it is coming to Android and iOS this fall, likely in October.
Kingdom franchise creative director and co-founder of Raw Fury, Gordon Van Dyke, showed us a working prototype of Kingdom Eighties running on an iPhone 14. He assured that the game would have feature parity across Android, iOS,anddesktop, and apologized right away for not showing the title on any of thebest Android gaming phonesout there.
If you’ve ever played a Kingdom game before, whether on mobile or on desktop, Kingdom Eighties should feel familiar instantly, even if it catapults you a few centuries into the future. The style and the gameplay are instantly recognizable, and Raw Fury only added on top of it with some thoughtful improvements and a whole beautiful new world to explore, complete with a story that explains many of the concepts introduced in previous Kingdom installments.
The only thing that’s missing is co-op. Gordon Van Dyke says that adding co-op would have incurred additional design challenges that would have made this first story-driven installment of Kingdom hard to get across the finishing line, so they omitted it. He does acknowledge that people love Kingdom’s co-op mode, and that future titles would likely all include the popular mode again.
Kingdom Eighties is inspired by the creator’s childhood
Gordon Van Dyke also tells us that the inspiration for the game comes from his own childhood and a fatigue the team felt with the medieval setting it’s been using since the first game. “I was born in 1974 and I was living in California, in the San Francisco Bay Area,” Van Dyke said. “Tons of my references and my experiences were shaped by the 80s,” which also goes for his approach to game design. Eighties is then, in a sense, his most personal project yet. The graphics and some of the places in the game are even inspired by the area he grew up in, and there are even references to old childhood squabbles he’s had.
A big challenge was translating the core elements of medieval warfare to a different time. The eighties surprisingly proved to be a perfect match thanks to the incorporation of a summer camp and the young age of the characters. This allowed the creators to explain more naturally why they would ride on bikes (in lieu of horses) and use bows and catapults rather than modern weapons.
When we asked him whether he and his team had any concerns about the similarities to Netflix’s Stranger Things franchise and its Oxenfree games, he thinks that it’s ultimately just different creative teams pulling from similar experiences and being inspired by the same things, and using familiar 80s tropes. Kingdom Eighties is, after all, a homage to the creator’s own childhood, and not to Stranger Things — even if both Kingdom and Stranger Things ultimately boil down to a dark entity entering the world and a bunch of kids saving their hometown from it (which, to be fair, is a trope used bymanycreative works).
Kingdom Eighties gets a new survival mode on all platforms
One of therecently announced updatesfor the desktop version will also make it to mobile right from launch: Survival Mixtape Mode. Once you’ve finished the campaign, survival mixtapes allow you to go back to the places you’ve visited before, playing against the clock, with a three-tiered high score showing you how many days you’ve survived.
The mixtape mode couldn’t look more eighties, with a full-blown cassette recorder interface in charge of selecting your preferred scenario, with satisfying sound design to go with it.
A Kingdom Two Crowns update is also coming
Raw Fury is planning an update for Kingdom Two Crowns soon, with some of the features and gameplay ideas introduced in Eighties supposed to come to the familiar 2018 release. Asked whether there were any future plans for new Kingdom games, Gordon Van Dyke explained that the team basically built what it could want to build with the current technology.
For a future game, they would have to redo the entire engine, meaning they would have to start from scratch. Since that would take a long time, they want to add as much interesting content and fun things to Kingdom Two Crowns as possible, as well as Kingdom Eighties-like standalone expansions, saying that they “at least have one that people can play.”
For the future, fans are “probably going to have to wait, if we do something bigger.” This sounds a lot like Raw Fury isn’t sure about the future of the Kingdom franchise just yet, but if a big new game is coming, it’s going to be a huge upgrade.
