Indie games have resurrected a fair few nostalgic aesthetics over the years. In hindsight, it was inevitable that gorgeous 16-bit-styled pixel art would make a comeback with the rise of indie gaming in the early 2010s, though maybe fewer people were expecting the warbly low-poly look of 3D PS1 graphics to have reemerged with something of an 'arthouse' status today. Now, it's apparently the turn of early 2000s RTS games, as playing a few hours of Renaissance: Kingdom Wars takes me back to late bloodshot nights in front of a CRT screen shuffling units around in Warhammer: Dark Omen and Shogun: Total War.
And that doesn't just come down to the rustic 3D modelling. Clearly this was an economic consideration to an extent, but the two-person dev team at Reverie World Studios has fully leaned into it. Clicking kings and lords on the campaign map brings up basic animated 3D avatars that stare at you with white-eyed intensity, units on the battlefield are disproportionately huge next to buildings, the UIs are bold and weighty, and the spritey building icons have little animations with a dithered effect historically used to offset bit depth limitations. It's a style this studio has deployed for all its grand-strategy-RTS hybrid games since its debut in 2013, but now in 2024 it's looking more pointedly nostalgic than ever.
Beneath the retro veneer, Renaissance is surprisingly accessible despite juggling several styles of strategy at once. Its campaign, where you dally in diplomacy, scheme against neighbouring lords, and move your armies around 16th century Europe, is like a Crusader Kings-lite. On the battlefield, you have the scale and tactical twiddling of Total War, but with a lot more speed and automation.
Then there's the base-building and resource-gathering aspect of Age of Empires, but again made easy thanks to the speed of the building process as well as predetermined plots of land to build on. I particularly like how when you click to build walls, they get automatically erected in a sensible perimeter around your base, with locations of towers, stairs, and gates all decided for you; there are many elements to engage with here, and Renaissance makes sure you don't get too bogged down in any one of them.
All this meant that when I took over my first hamlet as a Lithuanian mercenary captain, I settled right in, quickly sending a gift of silver to the king to reassure him that my military advances within his kingdom were no threat to his crown (for now) before gathering a warband to plunder towns in neighbouring Poland. Each action has diplomatic consequence, but I made the call that any reprisals would need to consider the fact that attacking me would effectively be an attack on Lithuania itself, which the Polish king would hopefully decide wasn't worth the hassle for the sake of a few peripheral villages.
Renaissance is quick to build up a sense of scale. Where in Total War you'd need to spend a fair bit of time in the campaign before reaching those epic battle sizes teased by the trailers, here within an hour I was fending off a siege from a neighbouring lord involving multiple siege towers and hundreds of units. Recruiting units is instantaneous on the campaign map, as is building or upgrading the buildings needed to maintain them with food and silver. You can also recruit units within the battles themselves, scaling up AoE-style if you were short on numbers going into the battle.
The game creates conditions for big fun battles rather than being too punitive should you fail to plan properly beforehand. I'm especially excited by the prospect of playing an online campaign with a few buddies; the game's relative simplicity and pace compared to other online-playable strategy games like Total War or Crusader Kings makes it much less daunting a commitment for those of us who don't have hundreds of hours on our hands to play out sprawling strategy sagas.
Renaissance Kingdom Wars has just dropped in Steam Early Access, and it definitely feels that way for now with a host of little bugs and jankiness (the cursor selecting units manning the walls when I was desperately trying to close the town gate, for example, or the camera full-on spinning out whenever I tried to rotate it). But the dev's got enough experience with its unique brand of hybrid strategy at this point that I expect this stuff will quickly get ironed out in its Early Access journey. This could prove to be a welcoming strategy fix for those with the fundamentals of more complex games etched into their muscle memory.
