So, Once Upon a Kingdom starts off with a cool cutscene and a bit of story and setting up on your little plot of land. Sadly, from there it’s a bit slow and doesn’t seem to be great at explaining what to do next. Thankfully, for a few in game days, there isn’t a lot to do…you gather a minimal amount of raw resources during the day cycle, and then you can’t do anything at night. The demo doesn’t seem to have a point to it’s night cycle, which is short thankfully, but I feel like they could have just hit the end of day and moved on to the next day without it.
A few days into the demo, you finally get your tutorial cards, which are consumed immediately to build, with buildings having placement rules rather than building completely free. This is fine, and is shown on the map as well as how it’ll effect the map. You do need to build resource generating buildings near their resources, beans, water, houses, and storage all clump together of sorts.
For some reason, you end up under attack and you can build towers to defend your base, though you’re not really given any guidance of where you’ll be under attack, and unlike a traditional tower defense, there are no lanes. Once you unlock free building, you just need to scatter towers everywhere, and you can use your main hero character to defend as well.
The demo ends on day 21 and doesn’t seem to go into any further depth from when you unlock the deck building aspect, which feels lacking with the limited cards in the demo, especially when you’re building three separate decks and one of them only contains towers. You choose which to draw from, and pick 2 out of 3, which feels pointless in that case.
The art and music is great, it feels like it’s got a lot of potential, I just feel like it could do a bit better job of tutorializing some of the intro, adding more story interactions with your god, and maybe adding more to do with your town beyond a little bit of resource generation. I’d even say that adding more cards to the demo would have been a good move too, or build one combined deck so draws aren’t as predictable. If the deck doesn’t add a decent bit of randomness, it doesn’t seem to add anything versus a standard city builder where you have buttons to pick what you build.
The demo is up ahead of Next Fest and has no release date, so hopefully they’ll get some feedback and make adjustments before their launch.