Civilizations Run By… Penguins?!: A United Penguin Kingdom Review

By JT

Players: 1
Platforms: PC

United Penguin Kingdom is a city builder centered on penguins and penguin-kind. Like other city builders, United Penguin Kingdom allows players to create an entire civilization, complete with harvesting, energy production, and defense against the elements and enemies alike. Climate change is rearing its ugly head, and the king penguins are all in danger! Ensure your penguins don’t get sick or attacked as your settlement hopefully grows into a thriving metropolis. Explore, research, and trade in a game that allows a good amount of freedom within its borders. However, space is often limited, so it’s your job to utilize production and the space provided. Now, does that make the game comparable to others within the same genre? Let’s find out the good and bad of United Penguin Kingdom!

United Penguin Kingdom starts you off with a plot of land and some penguins. It’s up to the player to decide where to best utilize them. The game first has the player build a Builder’s Hut, Warehouse, Pharmacy, Food Storage, and Treasury. Each of these buildings are important in keeping stock of resources, apart from the Builder’s Hut, which holds up to 4 penguins for constructing buildings. With a lack of other predators that might attack random land buildings, building up an entire nation is surprisingly simple in any mode. The elements aren’t extremely harsh either, leading to penguins falling ill, but as long as there are enough herbs and medicine they’ll all be in relatively good shape.

From the beginning, United Penguin Kingdom gives a choice of how you want to play, and the type of flag you want to carry. Is the frequency of enemies more relaxed? Do you grant yourself more resources? Would you carry on choosing a more difficult range of settings and just set yourself up for Survival Mode? Since I wanted punishment, I obviously chose the most difficult option and what appears to be the most difficult map of the 6 you’re able to choose from. Feeling confident, I went in with a decent number of expectations. My initial trial was to test how difficult the Survival difficulty was, and here was the result. First run, great in the beginning, but slowly started to peter out. Once you begin splitting up living space and workspace, then illnesses set in, and penguins also begin to starve at a rapid rate. This led to all my penguins dying in a matter of minutes. Even the medicine and food I tried to rapidly produce couldn’t slow the death rate. I also attempted to just move everyone back into place, but to no avail. My entire settlement was wiped and that was that; lesson learned. Later playthroughs weren’t going so well until I really got the hang of the game, then as time progressed, Survival Mode became incredibly easy and simple to adjust to. With only really two enemies in the entire game (Being killer whales and seals by the way.), the only true battle fought was that of starvation and illness.

Time to talk about United Penguin Kingdom’s look and feel. The game looks like a mobile game, and I kept wondering if it should have been a mobile game. This mobile game feel mostly due to the art style and menu system. That’s not saying there is anything wrong with looking like a mobile game, because that just means there could be a very small gap between the PC port and a possible future mobile port. If there was, and the game’s price was well in line with other mobile games of similar size and scope, then I would have no problem making that purchase. The game is fun otherwise. The music is generic, but serviceable. Controls are very simple, allowing you to pause and resume with a tap of the space bar.

What makes United Penguin Kingdom so much fun to play is the fact that it’s a city builder that doesn’t punish the player over time. Instead, the game often rewards players for reaching goals, often with much needed resources. Although, there is something to be said about some items being given as rewards that are not needed whatsoever after a certain number of goals have been met. Much of that is food, but if you have a good supply of food going, then it’s just another tool for trade. Even in Survival, which is considered hard difficulty, the game feels too easy. It’s easy enough just to farm resources, but if that’s all you’re worried about doing then that takes away a bit of enjoyment from the game. If someone goes into a game with the most difficult setting in mind, they probably get joy out of some form of punishment, but the game never goes in a good direction with that. The only range of difficulty is inexperience, because easier modes will keep you afloat until you can get up to speed on how the game and its mechanic work. This includes adding more starting food, metal, or wood. As an enemy, the killer whale could either have a bit of health or a lot of health, and with enough time dedicated to defense, this doesn’t become an issue. Over time nothing becomes an issue, as long as there are no dramatic transitions. My own fault for attempting to move an entire town over from my main block of land to the next. There is a News Tower you could build early within the game that gives hints and tips disguised as news, which I originally failed to notice. It set me back a whole playthrough the first time.

United Penguin Kingdom has a lot to do, such as building science hubs for science points to use for unlocking buildings or upgrading the old ones. You also explore new lands, even if it's just by way of one of your explorer penguins. Building up reputation points can be a big chore though. Penguin houses must be near their place of work, their place of worship, and next to anything that grants them happiness for good utilization. Overall happiness gets factored in to helping build reputation points, same with knowledge, where you must keep on top of building more libraries and schools, otherwise all your penguins will begin to suffer in productivity. Productivity governs how fast items are produced or carried over to other facilities. For example, unlock the Food Stand and build it next to a row of houses and near food production, and it’s like a conveyor belt of happiness fed right to the penguins on that block. All my playthroughs were a mess, but every time I attempted another playthrough, I found that I did substantially better than the one before. My latest playthrough yielded the best results, but there is always room for improvement. Getting to the next stage, from Village to City wasn’t too bad, but then attempting to get to Settlement was painful. The final stage, King, feels so out of reach but is doable. Each of these stages grants the ability to unlock and use certain buildings or upgrades to certain buildings. However, drop back down a stage and everything you’ve unlocked there becomes locked again. 

United Penguin Kingdom isn’t anywhere close to the Civilization series, Age of Empires, or even the original SimCity games. It’s a game with a much smaller scope, with simple strategy elements and a simple layout. There’s not much to it, but if you’re looking for something simplistic in nature, then this is probably one of the better games on the market. At $15 though, it’s difficult for me to recommend this game to anyone in its current state. United Penguin Kingdom is a timewaster, but one that’s fun to play. My only real gripes being the lack of enemies and the lack of any real sense of difficulty. There are lots of games that do what it does better, but I hope this game gets some DLC that really helps it shine. This is a game I would love to see more out of. United Penguin Kingdom is a game I would love to see succeed, and while I believe it would be a good mobile game, I don’t believe that it’s a good PC game. The game needs a lot more added in, and its current state feels rather dry. It’s a decently good game nonetheless, and something I spent hours trying to get the layout I wanted.

Check Out United Penguin Kingdom on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2635350/United_Penguin_Kingdom/

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Story: N/A
Gameplay: A
Graphics: C+
Music/Sound: C
Value: C+

Overall: B-

Pros:
+ Everything works as it should and the controls are simple and easy to figure out.
+ Graphics are more than just serviceable, and paired with the sound, they add to the overall experience.
+ Good amount of options to explore before starting up a new file.
+ The amount of options available during gameplay remain high.

Cons:
- Lack of enemies.
- Lack of difficulty.
- Attempting to reach the next stage can be a very daunting task.

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.

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