Kingdoms and Castles now has a creative mode, new buildings and more

Kingdoms and Castles is a good example of a developer pushing hard towards expanding their game and it's really showing well.

Back when it originally released, it just didn't have enough of anything to get you past 1-2 hours without really seeing everything. Since then, a number of updates has boosted the amount of content quite a bit. It now has a creative mode, allowing you to modify the map before you play and tweak all sorts of things. So if you want to spawn a lot of dragons, you can go nuts.

Seriously though, a creative mode is great, giving you the ability to properly experiment with whatever you like. I think more games need such a mode.

Are you having an issue with happiness? Good news, you can now build a Cathedral which gives out happiness like candy in a large radius around it. It's expensive though, but sure looks nice. Oh—they can also convert invaders into peasants for you.

On top of that, you can now also build a Great Library, which also spreads happiness and they will increase the maximum happiness of small libraries within their radius. They're also where you will be doing research to upgrade your kingdom. Finally, for new buildings there's the Bathhouse, which require you to get water to them via aqueducts and they will also provide some happiness to your people.

They've also added support for Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Russian languages—phew, what a list! Having a game in your native language is obviously preferrable and provides a better experience, so it's nice to see more.

Kingdoms and Castles has also seen lots of smaller improvements recently too, like the ability to rename transport ships, an attack tower range indicator and so on. One thing I'm particularly pleased about, is rubble now having a button to re-build whatever was destroyed there, something I noted as an annoyance in my original article I'm pleased to check off the list.

Impressed with the post-release support on this one, will be interesting to see if the developer takes it much further.

You can grab it now on: GOG, Steam.