Kingmakers mashes the medieval era with modern weapons and its trailer is a viral sensation

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Also third-person shooting with strategy

Image credit: Redemption Road Games

Kingmakers has too much going on to easily summarise, but I’ll try. Really, though, you should just click below and watch the trailer, which will surprise and delight you with its twists and scope in a way my words will not.

Kingmakers – Official Announcement Trailer

The Kingmakers announcement trailer.

Watched it? Good.

So, Kingmakers is a combination of medieval-era war simulation, strategy game, citybuilder, and third-person modern military shooter. Who better to lead us in this game of Medieval: Total War, than this time traveller with a pickup truck, a helicopter, several machineguns and a grenade launcher?

Your aim is to stave off the apocalypse. You’re traveling back in time 500 years to medieval England in order to alter the course of history. There you’ll find huge battlefields filled with thousands of soldiers, and you can join in, fighting alongside them with your gunpowder and body armour, or flick to an above-the-field view to issue orders to squads under your command.

Its own developers describe it as “a solo or co-op action/strategy sandbox game with real-time simulated battles in a war-torn medieval era and a modern hero”. They’ve been working on it for four years with a 20-person team. They’re aiming to launch into Early Access on Steam later this year.

Yes, yes, I want this. Other games have tried to mix historical and modern weaponry, or third-person action and strategic command, with mostly mixed results (Gettysburg: Armored Warfare, anyone?) because it’s hard to execute well at lots of different things at once. But I look at Kingsmaker and I understand the fantasy and I think it could be a great, daft time to play with pals.