The KKnD remake using the OpenRA engine has a first release out

KKnD, the classic strategy game is being revived and the new open source project has the first release out. Note: Much like other open source remakes, this is not official.

I was going to write this up last night, but it seems I jumped the gun a bit before they had all the bits in place. Nice to see such quick and polite communication from their team though.

Unlike Red Alert and the other titles served by OpenRA, KKnD and KKnD 2 were not made freeware. You will still need the games for the full experience. However, this remake will download the demo files for you to get you going.

Testing it out and it does seem to work reasonably well, even on my Intel laptop so that's nice:

Considering I couldn't really grasp it when I tried it so many years ago (I was only around 9-10 years old when it originally released), I'm hoping to properly see what it's all about thanks to this. Yet another reason why I love open source remakes! Not just reviving older games with new features and improved support for higher resolutions and so on, it's the fact that I get to replay a game from my favourite genre on the operating system of my choice.

Anyway, enough rambling. To download it, their AppImage is pretty handy from the release post on GitHub.

See more about it on GitHub or the official site. If you want the full game to access music, movies and so on you can find it on GOG.

Hopefully with the OpenRA game engine maturing, more projects can pop up like this to revive some other classic RTS games. I'm longing for an updated Dark Reign and the OpenRA game engine would work for it, someone make it happen.