Fury Studios is one of the smaller but just as great studios that recently popped up; however, it’s not quite what you think it is. Fury Studios was founded in 2019 by Raw Fury, the all too infamous publisher who has helped publish games like Mr. Sun’s Hatbox or Gun Jam. Fury Studios might be a subsidiary but they’ve been really consistent with their vision, and this vision is called Kingdom Two Crowns.

Fury Studios released Kingdom Two Crowns in 2018 and several DLCs as time went on and they gained quite a lot of popularity until they released Kingdom Eighties on 26 June 2023. However, this isn’t just another DLC for their famous pixel art side scroller tower defense; instead, it’s a standalone expansion in the form of a short story that takes place in the 1980s. The world of Kingdom Eighties might be a blast from the past for you or a window to the past; either way you look at it, get ready for things to get weird.

Kingdom Eighties starts off with a proper 80’s themes intro cinematic to showcase the Leader along with the Greed. Now, the Leader is actually a camp counsellor at Camp Kingdom, that is until the Greed attacked and threw Hill Valley into chaos. Lucky you for, as Leader, you’ll have the help of the kids as long as you can pay them to join your cause, and they’ll be more than happy to take up arms for you. Your objective initially is to get to your parents, though this changes quite often from finding your parents to stopping the Greed while making sure they don’t get the Crown of Creation which was given to you by a spirit.

The story might take a while to unfold, considering that the Kingdom series is known for having a lengthy build-up, but it is well worth the twists and turns. For now, back to the story. With everything going on, your easiest course would be to take a canoe to get back home to your parents, that is, until the Greed took it through a portal on the far side of the camp. As for the Greed, they are an ancient race of sorts, basically odd and simple-minded creatures that infect the land along with the animals to get the Crown of Creation.

When you start out in Kingdom Eighties, it’ll only be you and your bicycle. As a Leader, you’ll need friends and every extra hand you can get. In this case, your most important tool will be kids, yes, actual children. However, they’re easily bribed with a single coin and will take up a hammer to build or a bow to fight, depending on whichever is available at the time. Luckily, you don’t have to order them around as they’ll grab what’s available and run to where they need to be, though this is where things take an interesting twist.

The twist in question is with giving orders in a sense; with anything you want to do or want to be done, you’ll have to pay coins. However, every task or action has a set number of coins, from new buildings to upgrades, and the cost does scale for upgrades. This is normally not an issue as long as you make sure to have a few coins on hand when you start out in a chapter, or you might have to hope for a random coin chest or that your archers will yield some coins from the infected wildlife.

Kingdom Eighties would be a little boring without some action or chaos, and this is where the tower defense aspect comes in. Luckily, this game is a side scroller, so you don’t have endless entrances to cover in this regard, but you’ll need to build and upgrades walls. Your walls are the ends of your camp, though these can be destroyed by the nightly waves of Greed that will throw themselves at your walls until bigger Greed creatures appear that will do much worse. This is why it’s vital to upgrade your walls when possible.

However, you’ll also need to upgrade and eventually fortify your walls while expanding outward. First off, expanding is relatively simple; it’s just a matter of cutting down the trees to clear away any obstacles and having the kids build a wall on the revealed traffic cones. You will need to guard the kids as they build because your walls can be passed through until they’re ready, Greed monsters that attack the kids will cause them to drop their tools at first, then permanently remove them on the second strike if they didn’t pick up their tools.

Worry not; while you as Leader can’t attack, your friends Champ and Tinkerer can do some damage or at least knock back the Greed. Until you manage to recruit Wiz, who can build turrets along your walls and a mobile cannon. The cannon is great, but it needs to be defended behind a slightly modified dumpster that Champ will push while you lead on. At least you’ll still have Tinkerer, who can still help knock back the Greed while Champ and Wiz push forward.

Having all the many things you can do and build is nice, but you can do much if you don’t have coins. Once again, this is where your under-age workforce comes in to help you out by doing chores. Granted, the chores range from picking berries to running shops that can somehow still generate coins. This is also why it helps to have a few coins on hand just for the sake of starting up some form of income without having to worry. It’s wise to keep in mind that your income isn’t instant; it can take almost a full day in-game before you start seeing coins for some of the bigger actions. Though you can also take a stroll through the camp and any kids who have coins that they picked up will drop them for you.

Now for the part that matters most, the Leader. Unfortunately, you can’t fight or do any kind of damage to the Greed unless you pick up a bike or something with a gun attached to it. On the matter of switching bikes, you’ll find several different bikes, skateboards, and other forms of getting around in each chapter, and while you have to pay to unlock and switch to them, some of them do come with more interesting features like a longer sprint time, guns that can harm the Greed and more. There is one slight downside to the Leader, the coins you carry are also what keep you alive in a sense. If the Greed hits you, you’ll start losing money at a scary rate until you only have the crown left.

As mentioned earlier, the Greed wants the crown more than anything. They’ll run off with coins as well but the crown is their target, and losing the crown means game over for you. However, if you lose the crown and you take another hit from the Greed as well, it’s also game over. This is a little silly and really overplays the ‘Lead and nothing else’ trope; it would be nice if the Leader could at least have some form of attack instead of a quick stamina recharge. However, there is one slightly annoying thing about the Leader…. While he can sprint and quickly recharge after having a drink of water, the animation has to play out entirely or it simply doesn’t count.

There is one other minor issue that Kingdom Eighties has that can somewhat draw away from the overall game, it’s not always clear what you need to do next. Having a ton of coins will sometimes get you some help from the mysterious spirit who will lead you to something that needs to be upgraded for you to continue, but you’re pretty much on your most of the time. As an example – You need to upgrade your camp to a high enough level before the dumpster is unlocked, but it just isn’t shown that you need the dumpster or how high you need to go to unlock it.

Kingdom Eighties definitely throws you back to the 1980s with the sound design and music used in-game. It gives the game a very retro feel while shifting between what’s happening, though it also uses some electronic music too that helps everything along. Normally, you wouldn’t see much in terms of environmental sound effects for a pixel-art game, but this was added in too, and it adds a little extra life to the game to keep you immersed.

On the visual front, it’s honestly rare to see pixel-art games and even rarer to see well-made and interesting pixel-art games. Sadly, it’s an art style that isn’t used as much anymore nor does it get much attention since everybody always wants the most hardware intensive games. This is definitely a nice change of pace and a fun throwback to the early days of gaming. Who says you can’t get incredible detail with low-res pixel art? The colour palate used for the game does follow your typical loadout for pixel-art games, with striking colours like bright purple or red used for the bad guy in the story and more mellow colours for everything else. It might not look like it, but you might end up staying just to admire the detail that went into Kingdom Eighties.

Overall, Kingdom Eighties is a fun blast from the past and maybe even a window into what life once was. The attention to detail on the world design combined with the music already add a lot of life to a scene that’s been mostly abandoned and it’s refreshing to see that pixel art still has a home in gaming. For now, we can only hope that other studios might do the same and take a break for something simple but fun.  

Jay Claassen (@R3GR3T_3NVY)
Editor, NoobFeed