Approximate amount of time to 100%: 45h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 6/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: multiple times, as there are campaign specific achievements
Is there a good guide available: Not really, you can find info all over the web
Multiplayer achievements: Yes, but can be done solo using a keyboard and a gamepad, or 2 gamepads. (You have to sail between islands a bunch of times in coop)
Missable achievements: Yes, multiple but not really that bad if you consider that you have to play through multiple campaigns
Grinding Achievements: Yes, retrieving your crown 300 times is grindy, but can be done after you cleared the game in one reign by not destroying the dock portals but only the cave portals. After receiving that achievement you can go to an island with a dock portal left and stand next to it to get your crown knocked off without the chance of really losing it.
DLC-Only achievements: Yes, The DLCs are needed for the achievements. 2 of them are free on Steam but the Norse lands is a paid DLC
Speedrun achievements: Yes, defeating all the grind on all islands in one reign is kinda a speedrun, as the more time passes (and portals destroyed) the harder the game gets.
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: A little bit for the 20 towers on max level, for me in my latest playthrough on island 3 there were enough spots, but I'm not sure I normally checked island 3 as 4 or 5 would make more sense.
Does difficulty affect achievements: Yes, but you can play on the easy difficulty and still unlock the achievements, just don't play on "peaceful" as on that difficulty you won't unlock achievements
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
This review has a long time been in the making. I adore this game, it is so much fun and I have even played through it with multiple friends. Then why did this review take so long you ask? Because I like to review my games after getting all the achievements and this game has 1 very challenging achievement and one very grindy achievement. The grindy one I could have get a long time ago, but what is the point if you know that there is this one achievement I wouldn't be able to get? Well, that changed yesterday when I found out there were tricks that felt very counterintuitive but worked well and that way it would only take around 4/5h to be able to get it.
However, let's start with why I like this game. Kingdom Two Crowns is one of those games in which you give tasks to people but do not directly control them, and in my opinion, this is one of the bests in that genre. You have to build up and mostly defend your kingdom. Find the right things to in the end be able to beat the evil, in this case, "the greed". It is so fun to be able to make decisions but have to keep in mind that you want to keep your people safe... build a new wall a bit further..? Do you workers have time for that during this day or should you wait a day? New workers.. which job do you give them? What is needed the most? The game works really well and looks beautiful! It is also awesome it has different campaigns to change things up a bit in case you like to play multiple times through it.
And to make this game extra special, you can also play with a friend, this is possible locally but also over the Internet. And it doesn't matter if they own the game or not, as the "remote play together" function on Steam works really well. You don't get more resources in multiplayer so you have to communicate what to do next so that you have enough workers as well as resources and keep an eye out for the timing of things. what will help is that when you switch to another island, you both can have a bag full of coins and in this way take extras to your next island to make the start quicker.
One of the things that I didn't like is that not much is explained in the game. There is this ghost that will sometimes point things about, but a lot is figuring it out yourself.. or most of the time "check the wiki". Activating a statue that shows clearly an archer, but what does it really do? Check the wiki! Found a new mount, but should you really switch to it, what is its unique ability? Check out the wiki. It is awesome that there is so much going on, but having to check the internet to figure out what it does, or why you want to do it or maybe not want to do something.. check out that same wiki again. I wish that was handled in another way. It is nice to not be stuck in tutorial land for hours, but there is a fine line between explaining stuff and explaining almost nothing.
Another thing of which I'm not a fan of was winter... I hate it in real life and I'm glad we're kinda past that season at the moment of writing this, but in this game, it can also be very boring. It is so much harder to make money during this season and money is needed for everything! A year in-game takes 64 days and from day 48 to 64 it is winter, which makes sense as it is 1/4 of the in-game year. But that are a lot of days of kinda just waiting to be passed so you can keep going with improving your kingdom. It even sucks more if you just switched to a new island before the winter and then have to build up while not being able to generate money easily. In my last playthrough, I decided when winter started that I could clean my kitchen and hopefully the winter has passed when I came back to my pc.
Back to those achievements, as I love to hunt down achievements and complete my games that way. Kingdom Two Crown has DLC achievements. Those I haven't unlocked yet because I'll buy the DLC in the future, but I know I'll love it as it is more of the same good stuff and sprinkled with more thematic stuff and extras. But the base game has a lot of nice and very doable achievements. some you have to directly go for (like kill no enemy for 5 days), but most of them you'll unlock by just playing through the game. It has 1 a 2 grindy ones, sailing between 2 islands in coop mode 30 times, this can easily be done solo but by activating the multiplayer local mode. Have the lighthouse on two islands and just sail between the two of them. The most grindy one is the one for retrieving your crown 300 times. Then there is a very challenging achievement for completing the game in one reign, one reign means you never lost your crown. which is in a normal playthrough is so very challenging because the longer you play without losing your crown the harder the monsters will get. Lose your crown and you get back to an earlier island but most of all the calendar is reset back to day 1.
After researching about that achievement again yesterday, as I have done in the past but that was a long time ago, I learned that there are tricks to make this very doable. For one, you can play on the easy difficulty. They added the difficulty settings later on but this makes it a lot better. And the second thing is knowing that when you destroy portals the enemies become stronger. I followed the plan of some speedrunners which basically was only to build what you need, never expand your base and don;''t waste time and resources on destroying the portal at the port side. Go from islands 1 to 2, back to 1, 3 and 4 and at 4 build up your base to max level and destroy the cave portal, then island 5 the same and destroy the cave portal, same on island 1, 2 and last on island 3. |Getting money quickly was important but I didn't use any farms as that would take time and you need to expand your base. The following video explains it in more detail:
Overall, I really love this game! It is one of the best games ever and I'm glad I was able to finally unlock all the achievements from the base game.
5.0