CookieRun: Kingdom

Imagine if Clash of Clans and Genshin Impact fell into a vat of cookie dough, then woke up in a pastel fever dream with ancient heroes, political intrigue, and a dog made of cake. That’s Cookie Run: Kingdom, a mobile RPG/city builder hybrid where your squad of adorable cookie warriors battle evil and redecorate your land in equal measure. And yeah, it’s kinda amazing.

You start as GingerBrave, the lovable biscuit boy who teams up with friends like Wizard Cookie and Strawberry Cookie to rebuild a ruined kingdom, standard RPG stuff, except everyone is made of sugar and trauma. From there, things spiral into a surprisingly weighty plot involving reborn heroes, corrupted Soul Jams, and a cookie civil war that spans continents named Crispia and Beast-Yeast (yes, really).

Combat is deceptively simple: real-time, mostly auto, with each Cookie slinging their one flashy skill while you micromanage toppings and formations. At first, it’s all baby’s-first-RPG, but with over 160 Cookies, ranging from pop idols to ancient dragons to Zhen Huan from Empresses in the Palace (no joke), team-building turns into a gacha-laced strategy puzzle. PvP can get intense, especially when the meta shifts harder than whipped cream in a heatwave.

But the real kicker? This game is absurdly generous. Daily rewards are modest, sure, but event compensation and scheduled maintenance freebies? Straight-up sugar showers. F2P players can realistically collect top-tier Cookies without sacrificing their wallets, or their dignity.

That said, the frosting isn’t without cracks. PvP has a quiet paywall ceiling, climb high enough, and whales with maxed-out meta Cookies start to tower over you like frosted gods. And while the devs are pretty great at polishing gameplay with quality-of-life updates, combat depth doesn’t quite match the hype outside of min-maxing.

Still, between its soulful soundtrack, gorgeously animated story scenes, and sheer serotonin of watching Cookie citizens boop around a kingdom you built yourself, it’s hard not to get swept up in the charm.

Cookie Run: Kingdom may look like a kid’s game, but don’t be fooled, under all that icing is a surprisingly rich, lovingly baked RPG that rewards time, not just money. It’s part gacha, part city builder, all Cookie chaos, and somehow, it works.