Everyone at some point has pretended to be a giant, lording it over mere mortals as you stomp about the place. ‘A World of Keflings’ on Xbox 360 lets you re-enact these moments, albeit without the merciless civilian slaughter.  A family friendly city-building sim at heart, A World of Keflings sees your Xbox LIVE avatar dumped into a world inhabited by little people called ‘Keflings’.  Being so much bigger than everyone else naturally draws a lot of attention, and suddenly you are seen as some sort of God-like figure – and that’s when the requests start.  It seems like every Kefling in the land needs a hand building something, and you’re just the giant to do it.

The game starts off in the ice kingdom, and eases you in nicely with several easy buildings to construct.  You are given a blueprint of each building, and on this blueprint is a list of what materials you need, and in what order they need to be laid out before the building can be built.  At first coming across materials is easy.  Rocks can be quarried from clusters, wood can be found by chopping down trees, and all is well.  These materials can then be taken to your factory where you can monitor what you can build; for example a kitchen may require seven rocks and five pieces of wood.

Things do get more complex though, and you will be asked to provide cut stone, or carved ice, which requires you to first build the relevant factory to perform said task.  This sounds like a lot of too-ing and fro-ing doesn’t it?  Well fear not as those little Keflings actually make pretty good slave labour…I mean ‘helpers’.  Throughout the game you can assign the Keflings jobs to do, and with careful planning you can organise quite a nice little chain gang with a group of Keflings quarrying various materials, and a group transporting them to various factories.  Of course, you need to keep an eye on what goes where because if you have 100 pieces of wood in your workshop, but need them in your factory then that’s a bit useless. If you wish to give a Kefling a new job to do, all you have to do is pick it up and remove its ‘job hat’.

To further simplify things you have access to a group of slighter larger Keflings who act as your own personal hired help.  This bunch of characters will carry various blueprint items for you, which saves you going back and forth from a factory to where you wish your new building plot to be.  They are also smart enough to run back and get new items should you have a stack waiting.  It’s a streamlined system and works really well.  Yes, you still have to keep a close eye on things but it is nowhere near as fussy as it could have been.  Add in the fact that if  you don’t like a building’s position you can simply push it elsewhere, and there are no complaints from me.

After a couple of hours play you are given the blueprint to build the witch’s house, and once that is built you can get access to potions that upgrade your stats such as speed. As mentioned earlier you start off in the ice kingdom, but there is also a forest kingdom and desert kingdom to explore.  The forest kingdom provides the meat of the game, with a large chain of buildings to unlock and build, with the eventual goal of building the King a castle.  The ice and desert kingdoms are much smaller, but act as welcome distractions.  It’s a sizeable adventure and will easily see you pass the six hour mark.  You also have access to online and offline co-op, as well as being able to gift items to your LIVE friends who have the game.  It also crosses over with Ilomilo and Raskulls, and having a save file with those games in unlocks secret blueprints.

Visually the game is perfectly adequate.  It never thrills, but it keeps in line with the family friendly theme running throughout.  What it does have in spades though is charm – you just can’t help but like those quirky little Keflings with their humorous dialogue.  There are also random little things to discover in-game, such as the musical cannons.  Place a Kefling inside one of these and it will be shot to the next nearest cannon to the sound of a musical note.  These notes can be changed, so it’s possible to line up a group of cannons, fire off a Kefling and produce a nice little song!

The biggest downside to the game is the fact it’s quite hard to play for more than twenty minutes at a time, as constantly building things gets a bit boring.  There is also very little incentive to proceed, and you begin to question why you are taking orders from these little chatter boxes, rather than ruling over them with an iron fist.

Pros

• Humorous dialogue
• Streamlined control system
• Lots to do

Cons

• Little incentive to proceed
• Can only really be played in small chunks

Overall A World of Keflings is a charming game, with a fair amount to achieve, most of which is done with panache.  It certainly isn’t a hardcore city-building sim by any stretch of the imagination, so if you are after a tough challenge this might not be for you.  For everyone else (especially those who game with their family) it comes highly recommended.

Score: 8/10