I don’t often play city-building games, but when I do, they are mostly mobile games that I play either when I am bored or want to escape a boring social situation. For me, such games are basically played once in six months, and the rest of the time, I never bother to touch them again. So, after going through the Steam page of United Kingdom Penguin, it did not look like a game I would play on a regular day. However, it had penguins in the title; frankly, that was the only thing that interested me.

Now, after 10 hours of playing this game, I am unsure how I feel about it. Was it better than I expected? Yes. As someone who thought I wouldn’t like this game, I got so addicted that I started seeing penguins in my dreams. However, United Penguin Kingdom has its problems, which I wish the developers had considered, and perhaps it would have been my new favorite management game.

Protecting and Managing The Penguins

Before starting the game, there was a tutorial section for players who wanted to familiarize themselves with the concept and controls. There are a total of three tutorial sections that give you a brief introduction to the basics. I did try out the tutorial before starting the main game, and it helped me get along with the flow of the gameplay, where the instructions felt concise and easy to follow.

United Penguin Kingdom Review: An Addictive City Builder With Its Own Flaws - - News | | GamesHorizon — Starting your settlement. Image by GamesHorizon

The United Penguin Kingdom opens by addressing a real problem – climate change and how the penguins suffering from it need to survive using renewable energy. After selecting the difficulty level and map type, the game gives you five main buildings and asks you to place them anywhere on the map. What the game doesn’t tell you, however, is that you won’t be able to relocate them later on, and wherever you build them will be permanent for a while.

Once your settlement has started to grow, you will get access to the calendar, allowing you to easily check what to predict each month within the year. Apart from that, an event log informs you of every activity happening within your settlement and is continuously updated every second.

With your settlement being in the middle of a water source, some dangers lurk in the form of seals and killer whales. The seals try to sneak into your settlement and steal food, while the killer whale mostly destroys your buildings. You will know when these enemies are ready to attack beforehand on your trusty calendar so you can prepare accordingly. The key to defending both early on is to build ice spear towers in every corner of your settlement so your food and buildings are safe. However, as you rank up, more defense towers are unlocked, which gives you a major advantage.

There are a total of four criteria in which your settlement is measured and ranked by – Happiness, Education, Money and Reputation. It is important that each of these criteria is maintained in order to grow your settlement.

For example, the happiness level increases when the penguins are living a comfortable life within the settlement like giving them houses to stay and providing them good food and building entertainment and community centers. Meanwhile, for education it is essential to build schools and libraries so the penguins can grow and also increase their productivity. Money is the amount of gold you gather by various means and reputation is the overall rank of your settlement. You get temporary reputation points which can affect the settlement both positively and negatively based on your actions. It is vital to maintain your reputation if you want to grow your rank and advance your settlement.

Your settlement starts with the rank of Village, and once you complete certain objectives, at the end of every year, there will be an annual report where you can see your rank and if you have, for example, continuously maintained a reputation of 1500, you will advance to the city level. If you don’t do well in the annual report, you get another year to try. After advancing to a new rank, a new technological tree opens up that offers new buildings to unlock with science points gained from the science hub.

There was a moment after I had advanced to the city level, and I got a series of back-to-back negative reputation points. Because of this, I lost my rank and got demoted to the village rank. This was a bit frustrating as I had to redo objectives and again maintain my reputation points to get to the city rank. So, the fact that you can actually lower your rank did put me off a bit. But that wasn’t the only problem with the game.

Where It All Went Wrong

The game has no story mode, and it has no additional modes to give the players something more to do. In fact, there were times when I just sat and stared at the screen, not sure what to do next because there was nothing I could do at a certain point in the game.

After maybe three to four hours, United Penguin Kingdom feels repetitive. Once I got demoted to village from city rank, my technological tree for the city rank got locked, which closed off my options to actually do anything new, as I had already unlocked everything at the village level. So, I had to just do the same objectives again and again, which were mostly production-based. I really wish the technological tree remained unlocked once it was unlocked so that it would have been easier to get promoted again.

Additionally, there was another problem of my penguins randomly getting sick and dying even though I had enough herbs and medicine in stock. This happened so often that sometimes my reputation score became a negative number. I tried to avoid this by building at least four herb collecting centers so there would be more stock for herbs, but it was useless.

I had no idea why this kept happening, and the more my penguins died, the less my population became. At one point, I did not have enough penguins to assign jobs. I did try to use the transfer center to request new penguins, but this particular request came with the disadvantage of negative reputation points. And new penguins join organically only once or twice within three to four months, which is simply too late.

The game never gave me any solutions to why my penguins were randomly falling sick. But it did make it difficult for me to maintain my rank once I reached the city level, and progressing further almost felt impossible.

Another problem I faced was the lack of an option to move your buildings. I cannot stress enough how much of an inconvenience it was to dismantle a building and rebuild it again just because I wanted to relocate it to another area. Also, at one point when I ran out of space on the main land and purchased another land, I wanted to reorganize my settlement. I couldn’t do this unless I manually dismantled each building and rebuilt them again when there could have been an option to simply edit and move the established buildings.

What Could Have Been…

I enjoyed my time with United Penguin Kingdom. Though the game’s flaws left a void of untapped potential, I can’t lie that it is still addictive and overall fun.

I can’t help but think maybe if this game went into early access and took into account player’s feedback, it could have been something special. However, will I continue my journey with this city builder? Sure. I can see myself occasionally playing this game once in six months when I am in the mood for it. But if you are a gamer who loves a relaxing city builder and likes penguins, maybe this one’s for you!