The Wild Age Switch Review

The Wild Age Switch Review
Version Reviewed: Nintendo Switch

Late last year, I reviewed a game called Monarchy, which was heavily inspired by another game called Kingdoms. The Wild Age, by McMagic Productions, follows a similar path, putting you on horseback and tasking you with throwing money at people to solve all your problems. Wouldn’t that be nice? But The Wild Age takes things a step further by bringing the experience into 3D and offering a fresh perspective on this familiar formula. What’s it like? Saddle up, get some change, and prepare to look majestic as we review The Wild Age for Nintendo Switch.

The Wild Age is a charming, minimalist take on the settlement-building formula that blends strategy and tower defence, which feels instantly familiar to anyone who’s played Kingdom: New Lands. That resemblance isn’t a coincidence. The developer, McMagic Productions, has openly shared that The Wild Age was heavily inspired by Thomas van den Berg’s original Kingdom, and that the project was even personally acknowledged and approved by van den Berg during its early development. Rather than replicate the formula outright, The Wild Age reimagines it in 3D, with a clean low-poly art style and a relaxed pace that makes it a little more approachable. After its PC debut, the game now arrives on Nintendo Switch as the developer’s first project built to understand the platform’s performance, publishing, and optimisation processes.

The Wild Age features a series of missions across a campaign that gradually unlocks new features and upgrades with each successful endeavour. You begin with a small camp and a couple of vagrants to recruit, then slowly expand by assigning jobs to your villagers. Builders need hammers, archers need bows, and both are vital to your town’s survival. Each day, you can send a merchant off to trade and earn coins, while your villagers generate income by hunting game, farming, or cutting down trees. Building a solid economy is a slow and steady process, requiring a careful balance between workers and defenders. Every night brings an attack, and it’s up to your soldiers to hold the line. There’s a surprising amount of strategy here. I constantly found myself torn between populating the farms I’d built, since they generate plenty of income, or investing in stronger towers and fortified gates to survive the next wave. Spend too heavily on your workforce and you’ll be overrun, but focus too much on defence and your economy will grind to a halt. Thankfully, there are some treasures scattered across the map that provide much-needed cash injections when you’re running low, and your purse carries on to the next mission, so fill your coffers before moving forward.

Speaking of moving forward, there were plenty of times during the campaign when I beat the objective, but decided to stay back and play on the current map, and that’s largely due to just how much fun I was having with The Wild Age. While early missions have a lot of the “tech tree” (I suppose we will call it) locked away, there was something so hard about leaving my kingdom behind, making me want to complete the specific project I was working on, like a new and improved defensive line, or even just finishing building everything I could build. While each passing night brought larger enemy numbers into the fold, so too did my ever-expanding economy, having over 50 archers poised and ready to defend all that I had built, while I stacked coins in the Kingdom’s bank to earn interest daily and turn me into a Capitalistic conqueror. Players can also create their own maps to try out in free play, allowing you to make farms closer to your home base, or make things even more of a challenge should they choose.

The Wild Age’s art style gave me old-school RuneScape vibes, offering a low-poly 3D engine that does a good job of painting your world. Buildings are interesting, units are easy to tell apart, and you can customise your character to give the game a personal touch. It’s backed by a score that reminded me a lot of Skyrim, and seemed to do nicely in the background, switching between tracks depending on your situation and not overwhelming your senses.

It is not without issues. The game can get a bit too dark at times, and there is no in-game brightness slider, so I had to turn my TV brightness up, which washed out the colour palette slightly. The game also has some performance issues, even on the Switch 2 during longer sessions. One objective tasks you with surviving 25 days, and by the 25th day, I noticed some frame rate stutter. In this session, I had over 60 archers and around 90 villagers in total. There are also some command quirks. You may need to clear certain sections of trees and wait for them to be removed before assigning a lumberjack to the next tree nearby. While you can queue up trees in some sections, there are barriers at the start of the next biome, which can be difficult to define and occasionally frustrating. Even with these issues, I found The Wild Age incredibly difficult to put down. The balance feels strong, and I really enjoyed building each kingdom, even if the maps feel somewhat similar.

For my Royalty, looking into accessibility options, there are none to speak of. So I recommend further research into finding out if The Wild Age suits your needs. At under $17 AUD, there’s a lot of fun gameplay and replayability here, giving The Wild Age excellent value for money. I spent most of this review period in one sitting, only stopping when my Pro Controller batteries died, making me realise that I had skipped lunch. Like any kingdom, it’s not without its issues, but players will still find a fun and engaging kingdom builder here with a level creator to extend the fun long after the campaign is finished. If this is McMagic Productions’ first attempt at making a video game, I can’t wait to see what comes next.

So, What’s it Like? The Wild Age is Like Kingdoms crossed with the graphics of Runescape.

In the interest of full disclosure, a review copy was provided by McMagic Productions, but this doesn’t influence my score.

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