Kingdom Two Crowns

Kingdom Two Crowns is the sequel to Kingdom: New Lands, and is essentially the same game but with a two-player co-op option.

It took me 14 hours to win, but I played for another 80 hours or so to get all the achievements and play through the bonus content.

THE GOOD

• You can play 2-player co-op, which is overall really fun.
• Two Crowns doesn't force you to start from scratch after every death. Playing through the campaign felt less repetitive than New Lands did.
• The Challenge Islands in Kingdom Two Crowns are quite fun (Trade Lands, in particular) and gave me another 15 hours of fun. They change some key mechanics to give a different experience, and start you off in a really difficult situation, and require you to complete everything with one reign (like in Kingdom: New Lands).
• Two Crowns greatly improves the NPC AI. It can still be frustrating at times (such as when you have only 2 builders and they insist on both going left or right instead of splitting up).

THE BAD

• There is not enough new in Two Crowns for the main campaign to be challenging. I lost only once because I didn't know how a new mechanic worked.
• Playing with a friend, while very fun, makes the game dramatically easier. You no longer have the painful trade-off of figuring out which side to defend at night, as you have two monarchs that can defend both sides at the same time! And it doubles how fast you can build things and do stuff.
• There is no ability to cancel a command. This is a deliberate design choice by the game makers. It means that a momentary lapse of reason can completely ruin hours of work. This issue is actually worse in Two Crowns. In New Lands, when you die you start over from scratch. This means if you made bad choices it gives you a new chance to do things right without losing all your campaign progress. In Two Crowns, the structures remain even after you die, so if you place buildings badly you're stuck with it unless you restart the campaign entirely!

THE UGLY

• There was a bug with the merchant—after he'd been removed from the map, I saw him walk across the screen... but he was rotated upside down!
• When you lose your crown, the camera does this disorienting thing where it focuses on the crown instead of you, and this can be very confusing.
• We once saw one of the monsters drift past my troops and then wander all the way to the central castle before coming back. It was just a ghost-glitch with no real substance, but it was really weird and wasted a lot of time (especially since it happened during a Blood Moon, which paused game time). Basically, the whole game was paused while I waited for this ghost-glitch to wander back and forth!