One of the older games still left on my backlog this time. (Fun fact, there's apparently also a Flash version, not that those are easily accessible anymore as of this year.) I've had my eye on Kingdom: Classic (which kind of acts like a free demo these days) since it came out in 2015. But before I got to play it, Kingdom: New Lands was already out, so I opted for that instead. I seemed to have missed Kingdom: Two Crowns for some reason, which came out in late 2018.
So, I only played New Lands, but from what I read, the core gameplay is basically the same for all of them. Each next installation just adds a bit more content. So keep in mind that what I say probably applies to all of them.
Kingdom is an extremely minimalist strategy game. You play as a ruler, who gallops left and right on their steed, and the only thing they can do aside from this movement is to collect money and choose where to allocate this money. You can hire workers, get them tools to build/hunt/farm, fund farms, defenses, and some other stuff like shrines. After a few days, you'll be sieged by monsters each night. Survive long enough to build a big boat, and you win.
To start from the good bits - I find this minimalistic gameplay quite well executed. It's intuitive, and you can really do quite much with effectively only one interaction button. The art is really nice, and the music is fitting and beautiful.
Now, as for the problems - they mainly come down to pacing, unit AI, and general lack of content. The map is pretty long horizontally, and your movement isn't that fast. You have no overview of what is going on outside of your immediate view, so you're going to have to move around a lot, spending most of the game just getting from one place to another. It's slow, and it's not fun.
Secondly, the AI is really not up to par with a game this hands-off. If I can not micromanage my units, they must be capable of managing themselves. These fools will happily wander outside at night, getting beaten up by monsters and losing all my hard earned money. Builders prioritising important or nearby buildings? More like random things, sometimes even aborting an ongoing project to go elsewhere. And archers just... don't know where to go. They have no idea where to find enemies or animals to hunt. All in all, it makes for a frustrating experience, seeing such incompetence unfold.
Other problems are just the lack of building, unit, and enemy types, as well as sometimes lacking clarity of what some things do.
To conclude, Kingdom isn't a bad game or a bad idea, but it needs better AI, and a faster way to get around. Most of all though, it needs more content. In that regard, I would have almost certainly been better off trying the newest version, and you definitely should skip straight to that if you want to play Kingdom, but I understand it's still not a significant improvement. As such, I would have to give the overall series a "no". There's probably plenty of strategy games out there that would rather suit your fancy. This one doesn't respect your time, and even if you invest in it, you'll never reach satisfying gameplay. A bearable way to pass the time, at best.
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