Review of mobile "crypto" game Defend the Kingdom (DTK)
With no ads or buy-in, DTK is an addictive game that's just missing deeper crypto integration
It seems like every day a new crypto enabled game is released. Some of the really innovative games like Dark Forest get coverage but mostly I see press releases about new platforms, with scant details about the actual games. In between my posts about weed NFTs, I’ll try to give my two cents on new crypto games, starting with Defend the Kingdom.
Gameplay
Defend the Kingdom is a classic tower defense game. Enemies travel around the perimeter of a rectangle that you fill with your heroes to try to stop them. There are two modes: PvP and co-op.
Overall, DTK is a simple game with very low friction to get started. You don’t need a crypto wallet or to buy-in with an NFT in order to get started. It uses basic email/password auth. And it’s available on both iOS and Android. Here is some basic info that I will try to track for all the games I review:
Defend the Kingdom gameplay is addictive, but that might be related to my personal obsession with tower defense more-so than strong execution. There’s a lack of polish to the game including some typos, weird navigation, and screen cropping. For some useful tips on how to play the game, be sure to check out the “Tips” section from the main menu.
Crypto enablement
So gameplay is fine, but in the context of this review, what’s really missing is true crypto integration. The only functionality that clearly uses crypto is the rewards for tournament play. Those are distributed as a combination of USDC and NFTs. Unfortunately, I will not be one of the winners. After 15+ hours of gameplay, I’m ranked far from the top 100.
Although crypto is missing from DTK currently, it is clearly on their roadmap. Here is an excerpt from their parent company’s white paper. It’s possible that some of the functionality is already built with crypto underneath the hood.
About the creators
Defend the Kingdom was created by Kingdomverse, also creators of Monkey Kingdom. Monkey Kingdom is a popular NFT project with $400k in market cap. DTK seems to be an early proof of concept of a much more complex ecosystem Kingdomverse is building.
Here’s a quick summary of their white paper:
Actively developing real time strategy, battle royale, social deduction, and matching 3 games.
All games will represent object as NFTs that are tradable through a unified marketplace.
Kingdomverse Mobile Metaverse (KMM) will be the social hud for gamers to band into kingdoms and empires.
$KING is an ERC-20 token used for governance.
$SHIELD is a Polygon utility token.
Here are the $KING tokenomics: