Cookie Run: Kingdom by Devsisters Corp is a city-building auto-battler set in a saccharine world of sentient gingerbread people. There’s nothing here you haven’t seen a thousand times -- it’s a gacha-based hero fighter, after all -- but it boasts a level of polish, especially visually, that’s rarely seen in the free-to-play space.

In Cookie Run: Kingdom you must rebuild your gingerbread kingdom and fight off the evil creatures that have taken over the world in The Five’s absence. You’re given a mostly empty plot of land which serves as a canvas for your kingdom upon which you can build buildings and extract resources. The Cookies you unlock during play can also be assigned to certain buildings to speed up their production, and there’s some simple strategy to be found in optimizing for the most productive Cookie-to-building assignments. The resources you collect from your kingdom are used to unlock new stages for the auto-battler half of the game, meaning progression is locked behind a timewall of materials gathering.

Cookie Run: Kingdom Gameplay

Battles take place in isolated stages outside of your kingdom. Essentially, your party of Cookies run toward their goal, encountering enemies along the way that they must defeat. Each Cookie has their own special ability to help make dispatching of these baddies faster. None of this should be new if you regularly play auto-battler hero fighters. It’s interesting to note that the skills in Kingdom usually have different effective ranges and most will push back enemies, meaning you can sometimes use multiple skills to keep enemies locked within the area-of-effect of another skill for extra damage.

Kingdom puts a lot of effort into building up the universe established in the developer’s previous title, the endless runner Cookie Run: OvenBreak. Kingdom puts players back in control of GingerBrave after having successfully made his way out of the oven of the evil witch in OvenBreak. Now, he must resurrect a fallen gingerbread kingdom brought to ruin by the disappearance of The Five, a team of powerful guardian Cookies whose Soul Jams were stolen by the evil Dark Enchantress Cookie.

A creative and engaging game narrative

The story in Kingdom is so much more complex and involved than in the original, with a bigger world to play in and a whole new cast of cute characters to meet, including a never-before-seen gnome-like race of sugary snacks that melt when distressed. OvenBreak always hinted at some sort of broader narrative and a greater purpose for its baked protagonist, but Kingdom takes world building to a whole new level here.

Kingdom is also surprisingly cinematic, with long dialogues and exchanges helping to tell a tale that’s disproportionately huge for its cookie-sized heroes. And the production value is insane -- key events in the plot are shown to you in fully-animated cutscenes rendered in a charming cartoon style reminiscent of classic Powerpuff Girls.

It’s unfortunate that the game suffers from so much slowdown on older and budget phones, especially considering much of the previous game’s success was in Asia, where budget phones reign supreme. I tested Kingdom on my Xiaomi Note 8 and Nvidia Shield K1, and they both struggled to maintain a stable framerate whenever too many particles were on screen at once.

Cookie Run's Cookie Heroes!

Cookie Run: Monetisation Model

The main attraction in a hero battler like Cookie Run: Kingdom is always the heroes. Here you can unlock new Cookies by using Cutters, which are very rarely dropped during regular play, or by spending Gems, which can be bought from the in-game shop. The Cookie you get is always random, though some Cookies have a higher chance of dropping during certain seasonal or weekly events.

You can also purchase a Kingdom Pass which provides bonuses mostly centered around the game’s PvP Arena and Dungeon. Buying a Kingdom Pass grants you a new landmark decoration for your kingdom, reduces wait times in between Arena matches, and gives you more daily tickets to enter the Dungeon.

Cookie Run: Kingdom offers over-the-top world building and insane production polish, but underneath all the sharp animations and beautiful cutscenes is a bog standard auto-battler with gacha mechanics.

By Andi Nuruljihad for Gamesforum