Kingdom Eighties

Grab your bike, crank the synths, and pray the Greed doesn’t steal your last coin, Kingdom Eighties is what happens when Saturday morning cartoons crash into a minimalist strategy game and somehow it all works.

This standalone expansion to the Kingdom series doesn’t just slap some neon lights on a familiar formula, it shrinks it down, tells a tight, heartfelt story, and pours a can of Surge all over the pixel art. You play as The Leader, a kid armed with a bike, a mysterious family heirloom, and a total lack of adult supervision. Your job? Recruit your camp buddies, build defenses, and survive nightly onslaughts from goopy shadow monsters called the Greed. So basically: Home Alone meets The Goonies, but with more resource management.

Instead of kings and queens commanding armies, you’re organizing lemonade stands and pizza shops to fund your fight. Your companions aren’t elite soldiers, they’re neighborhood kids with slingshots and attitude. It’s charming without being cutesy, strategic without ever losing its laid-back vibe. The core loop is still Kingdom to its bones: side-scrolling base-building, coin-flipping to create jobs, and desperately defending your crown from the darkness. But this time, there’s actual narrative glue holding it all together, complete with retro-styled cutscenes and some serious Stranger Things energy.

Where Kingdom Eighties really earns its walkman stripes is in the Survival Mixtapes mode. Think: escalating waves, randomized modifiers, and level names like “Greed, First Goo.” It’s arcade chaos meets tactical endurance, and an unexpected highlight.

That said, it’s not all neon dreams. Longtime fans may miss the series’ signature co-op play, and performance hiccups creep in on older hardware. But the story’s brisk, the vibes are immaculate, and at five bucks on mobile? It’s kind of a no-brainer.

Kingdom Eighties doesn’t reinvent the Kingdom formula, it remixes it like a forgotten cassette found under your bed. Short, sweet, and dripping in 8-bit attitude, it’s a love letter to simpler times, both in gaming and childhood.

And hey, any game that lets me lead the Neighborhood Watch with a crown on my head and synths in my ears? That’s a win.