“Mini Kingdoms” at first looks like a typical rushed halfway Clash clone, but once you get past the art, it’s a nicely done, original, tight Clash-like.
At first you get warriors and archers, then giants. Yawn. The only resource is gold. There’s no theme and sloppy art. But then you notice how it actually plays. Attacks use tokens – no training. You place 3 squads, which can be changed at the start of the attack. Time stops while you’re placing one, and arrows show what they’ll attack, and the next two buildings after that. That’s pretty nice. There’s a toggle for x2 or x4 speed on the battles, which is good since there’s nothing to do once you place your squads.
The wizard troop is pretty neat. It does less damage than archers, but hits an extra building touching the first (a simple but pretty 2-part electric beam). Overall it’s better than an archer. But if the nearest target is killed first, it won’t necessarily keep on the second, and players have learned the anti-wizard tactic of having buildings not always touch. In practice you look at the base and decide: archers or wizards?
Defense-wise, you get some guns, but the third defense is great – a short-range giant-killer that you really need to plan for. It fires a huge shot every 5 seconds. If you let your giants get close, they will die. But archers can kill it with only a few losses since it fires so slowly.
The bombs look like garbage – triggering them produces a red circle for a second, then troops take damage. But they work great: you can see them, there aren’t many, and they trigger at 6 spaces and affect 7. It will reliably damage most of an archer squad. You’ve got to think about who will be where when they’re set off. The chicken-trap is anti-giant. The tool tip is wrong – it turns one unit into a chicken. It’s kind of funny since the chicken keeps attacking and runs pretty quickly. Sometimes it can stay alive for quite a while (but it always eventually runs ahead and is killed in one shot).
All-in-all, you have to look over the enemy base, check locations of everything and carefully place your three squads. The game gives you time for this. And you have to work for gold in this game. Build times are fast and gold costs go up fast. You get 3 attacks in an hour and opponents give predictable fair amounts of gold, mostly for winning. I think my longest Next-ing streak for a good base is 3.
Higher level troops are a flying archer and flying giant. Yawn, except the terrible art style is hilarious: one’s an archer riding a huge bat, the other’s an armoured guy riding an armoured bat. Then it gets very strange. There’s a ground fire-mage that spawns air troops when it attacks. And an air troop that does the opposite. Some of the high level defenses seem extra whacky, but I haven’t seen them in use.
It’s an interesting no-frills Clash-like. Quick to play, not too much to do, but all good stuff.