Kainga: Seeds of Civilization Review

Kainga: Seeds of Civilization is a rogue-lite city builder game that takes inspirations from Populus. Each run is a new 30 minute to 1-hour challenge that drops the player in a new location with only your Thinker and a few braves to start your civilization. You can fight other neighboring tribes but mostly you are trying to achieve an objective of creating a special festival type so you can win the match and go on to another with more unlocked stuff. So most of the game you focus on surviving monsters, the weather, and raids from neighboring tribes. It is a refreshing take on the RTS experience with unique building types. Being able to build on monsters is actually a pretty cool part of the game and core to the gameplay rather than just a gimmick. If you manage to build your village on the backs of walkers for example, you’ll be able to move away from dangerous situations. Walkers are also very capable at defending themselves.

If you seek for a god game, then move on. Kainga is no god game. There is no free will to your people, you are not an entity. Its a survival strategy RTS game where you control a hero figure that learns new technology and is present on the map as a special unit to do certain tasks others cant perform, while acting as a lose condition once you die. You don’t have any godly abilities to influence anything, like raising water or casting fire on enemy houses etc. Its building a village, setting up economy, training units, raiding your opponents.

I like the art style that the developers chose as it suits the whole ancient civilization fantasy theme, it has a unique hand drawn look to it, with the villagers changing depending on your choices, as you engage in your base building and push your borders across the map, seeking to achieve the goal that brought you to the specific location. That’s right; you don’t have to wipe out any opposing factions on the map, though if that is the goal, you shall come to many blows. I also have to give a special mention to whoever did the soundtrack for this game, The soundtrack alone is worth purchasing this game!

Kainga’s early access has a strong foundation and we can see that it has huge potential, although like most other early access games it has many flaws which I hope the developers will fix with upcoming updates, though I have no doubts as the developer is super proactive and always listening and engaging with the community.

Buy Kainga: Seeds of Civilization on Steam