When you hear a game is a civilization builder, it might make you think there’s going to be a lot of thought on your part. You know, like you’re going to have to make tough decisions. Strategies can be involved. Threats can lurk around every corner. That’s what I think Hundred Years Kingdom will be when I start it on Nintendo Switch. Instead, it’s a more relaxed game, with no real challenges, consequences, or critical thinking.
The goal of each Hundred Years Kingdom Running is to create a civilization that stands the test of time. You get a 6×6 tile space as your “world” and 100 years in the game. The first time you play, your only Oracle choices are Amaterasu and World of Vegetation. As you play, you will level up goddesses and earn more goddesses and worlds. (There are 5 Oracles and 11 worlds in total.) Each world is a predefined, predefined location. However, as you increase their level can make it easier to get three materials for growth. It’s culture, cuisine and production. Each goddess affects certain growth.
Gameplay follows the same pattern every time you play. The map begins to be blacked out, saving for an open space. You need to invest your resources in making the space available to use. Then, once you have done so, you need to grow them further to increase your production. There are no instructions. However, it is not too difficult and there are not many options. Let’s use an empty plain as an example. It will probably become farmland or mines. The first focuses on providing food, while the second provides production. If you go with farmland, that can turn into grassland or farm. Again, one side provides more food, while the other provides production. Ultimately this tree will max out with the set item you have to increase its production or a legacy building like the Palace of Versailles is an option. (Said feature is a winery upgrade.) Culture only comes from city spaces. Which you cannot build. They must be present as Settlements or upgraded variants on which are already on the map.
Each unlock or upgrade has its own culture, food, and production requirements, which will limit your growth. You can also upgrade one building per turn. Then time will pass and a year will pass. While each building’s effects can affect the output of neighboring areas, you won’t see them changing possible upgrades in any way. This means that trying to build certain structures next to each other doesn’t help earn something new. Follow the Offers request to try to build what your “people” want which can give a boost to one of your three resources. However, it’s usually not much. Goddesses can also provide additional resources each turn. But again, it was soon a drop in the bucket. Really significant buffs come from the occasional Golden Eras, tending to happen at least once every time. This increases your yearly on a resource type.
Since the upgrade tree is still pretty consistent and the elements iterate heavily on what you can do and how much you can earn, that means Hundred Years Kingdom amazingly repetitive. From what I’ve seen in my first three plays, skipping a year seems to be the only way to really hinder any progress. As long as you have done some development, you will continue to accumulate the necessary means to achieve a high score.
As for the localization, it’s easy enough to understand. I have noticed that sometimes character names may not be translated. For example, during my initial conversation with Amaterasu, her name was still displayed in Japanese. Freyja’s name is sometimes also Freya. There are some cases of confusing wording in the “Provided” section. But text doesn’t really take precedence here. Which means it’s not much of a problem.
I also noticed that Hundred Years Kingdom feel cluttered on Nintendo Switch. This is the kind of game where you are constantly clicking on tiles in a small space. On PC, I can see this relatively easily with a mouse. On the Switch, you’re limited to buttons. With isometric perspective, sometimes pressing in one direction may not get you to the square you want. It also means a lot of people insist to go to the locations to double-check what’s going on and the effects. After the establishment phase goes on, I find that forcing access to a selection of a new region sometimes fails to register. This will result in more than one tap. That, in turn, can get me into the Build screen when I probably don’t want that.
The Gallery section in the main menu isn’t very helpful either. It allows you to look back at your past Cultural History (completed civilizations), view Oracle records and construction details of the goddesses, and check out the Buildings section. I was most disappointed with the Buildings area. I would appreciate it if it shows the upgrade path for it, once you unlock it. (Sometimes, you can forget how to get something like Amsterdam from an agricultural brick, etc.) But instead it shows a brief summary, its art, its uses, the sources. the force required to create it and the number of times you have built it.
When it comes to it, Hundred Years KingdomIts biggest failure is that it doesn’t make you think. Every session ends with the same feeling. Since the maps are not randomly generated, you are always in the same place. Goddesses only seem to affect one type of construction and cosmetics on the other. If you want to get higher scores and more maps you need to keep playing the same maps you unlocked with the earned goddesses until they level up and you earn more . Probably the best things I can say about it is the low pressure and something to do. I mean, maybe sometimes you just want to click the buttons over and over as the numbers go up? This is a kind of surface-level simulation, which is rather tedious. At least it takes about an hour or so to finish a run.
Hundred Years Kingdom available on Nintendo Switch and PC.
