Kingdom Eighties

There’s a moment early on in Kingdom: Eighties where you’re pedaling past an arcade, summer sun flickering off CRT glass, and for a second you forget you’re playing a game about survival. Then the Greed arrive, wearing slasher masks, obviously, and you remember what you’re here to do: recruit the neighborhood kids, build some walls, and hold on to your crown like your life depends on it. Because it does.

This is the Kingdom formula, filtered through the VHS fuzz of an ’80s fever dream. It’s still a side-scrolling, coin-flipping base-builder at heart: collect money, build defenses by day, survive waves of enemies by night. The controls are a study in elegant simplicity, move left or right, drop a coin, pray the dumpster you turned into a barricade holds.

But Eighties adds new texture: an actual story (with cutscenes!), fixed levels with chapter objectives, and a gang of AI buddies to push shopping carts and build giant robots with you. There’s no co-op this time, a bummer, if you came here with a friend, but the vibe is warm, even solo. It’s the Goonies, if the Goonies moonlighted as urban tacticians.

That said, veterans might find things… breezy. Difficulty is gentler, and many of the deeper systems from Two Crowns have been streamlined or stripped entirely. Still, the pixel art glows with synthwave warmth, and the soundtrack pulses with quiet melancholy beneath its neon grin.

Kingdom: Eighties isn’t the deepest cut in the mixtape, but it’s a satisfying B-side, confident, stylish, and maybe just sentimental enough to make you care about saving a summer camp from the apocalypse.