Distant Kingdoms

My spreadsheet instincts told me to wait on this one, and the data backs that up hard. Distant Kingdoms launched into Early Access in May 2021 with a genuinely interesting pitch: four fantasy races sharing a single growing settlement, production chains layered across social strata from peasants to nobles, adventuring parties sent into fog-of-war hexes, and a choose-your-own-adventure event system tying it all together. On paper, that is a compelling genre mashup sitting somewhere between the Anno series and a light exploration RPG. The bones are there. The problem is that no one ever put the meat on them. The city-building core works along familiar lines. You place production buildings to feed supply chains, houses generate tax income, and citizens gradually climb the social ladder as their needs get met. Each of the four races, humans, dwarves, elves, and orcs, brings its own preferences and resource relationships. Dwarves lean toward engineering, elves toward mana extraction, and orcs trend toward agriculture and brewing. Watching those interlocks click into place has genuine satisfaction to it, and the visual style, warm and Warcraft-adjacent, keeps things pleasant. A tech tree guides your research progression, and up to 60 building types and 40 distinct goods give the production graph reasonable width. For the first few hours, it feels like the foundation of something worth caring about. But the problems accumulate fast once you push past that early honeymoon. The tutorial front-loads information without building real understanding, so failure cascades tend to come from opaque feedback rather than interesting decisions. The adventuring mechanic, which should be the game's secret weapon, ships shallow. You recruit heroes from a tavern, click a hex, and then pick the statistically best option from an event card, rarely because the writing compels you to read it. The exploration layer that should generate tension and story beats ends up feeling disconnected from the city sim beneath it. Research, rather than presenting meaningful branch choices, is a fully linear unlock queue. Players report long stretches of waiting on wood and stone with nothing meaningful to manage in the interim. The deepest issue, though, is not a design flaw you can patch. Orthrus Studios ceased trading in August 2021, just three months after launch. The studio founder confirmed the team had been made redundant, and the game was pulled from sale the following month. The last developer update on Steam is now over four years old. What was intended to be a one-year Early Access roadmap, one that included a full story campaign, additional maps, modding support, and expanded race mechanics, never reached any of those milestones. The Steam review score sits at 42 percent from 258 users, a mixed rating that reflects exactly what you get: a functional but thin slice of a bigger vision that will never be completed. If you can find this through a reseller and the price reflects its abandoned state, there are a few honest hours of city-builder comfort in the early game, especially if you enjoy the Anno-style production chain loop and do not mind a fantasy coat of paint. But go in knowing the adventure system underdelivers, the late-game does not exist, and no patch is coming. This is a game you buy as a historical curiosity or a cheap afternoon, not as a long-term city-builder to sink a season into.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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