Kingdom Tales review for Nintendo Switch, PC

Seeing as I?ve played a pair of Tales games from Ocean Media in the past year (note: not Tales of, but simply blank Tales), I went into Kingdom Tales with a pretty good idea of what to expect. I figured it would be a pretty basic resource management game with a vaguely medieval/fantasy skin, and not much else.

What I wasn?t expecting at all was the ugliest cutscene imaginable to start off the game. Like, we?re talking video quality that maybe — maybe — would have been acceptable back in the PS1 era. I?m quite sure I watched re-taped cassettes on my VCR back on my old CRT TV 25 or 30 years ago that looked better than this.

The good news is that brief moment of horribleness has nothing to do with the rest of the game. Once you?re past that, it?s straight back to what you?d expect the game to be — which is to say, as expected, much like Country Tales and Caveman Tales, you?re building houses, gathering natural resources, collecting taxes, and clearing paths of blockages and predators. If you?ve seen one of these games, you?ve seen them all.

(On that point, I?ll also note that there?s also a Kingdom Tales 2, which came out on the Switch at the exact same time as this first game. The good news is that it features a less abysmal cutscene to start, but apart from that, it?s no different than the other games.)

Of course, the worst part of that is that, like those other games, Kingdom Tales typically costs $10 — which seems to be about $9 too much, seeing as you could probably find a mobile game with the exact same gameplay (not to mention no eye-searingly bad cutscenes) for a fraction of the price. Simply being able to play the game on your Switch is no reason to pay extra, especially when the only thing that differs between these games is the theme.

Ocean Media provided us with a Kingdom Tales Switch code for review purposes.