Kingmakers drops a modern soldier into a medieval British war and hands him an assault rifle, a dirt bike, and an army of peasants. It is part third-person shooter, part real-time strategy game, and the two halves are meant to be used in the same fight, seconds apart.
Quick answer: You play a time traveler sent back to 15th-century Britain with modern weapons, switching instantly between third-person combat and an overhead view to build settlements and command thousands of soldiers. It is PC-only and still unreleased.
Kingmakers setting and premise
The player character is an elite operator sent roughly 500 years into the past to change the outcome of a war and stop an apocalypse in the present. The Welsh campaign shown in gameplay is set in 1403, during Owain Glyndŵr’s rebellion against King Henry V, and the goal is to turn that revolt into something much larger. Later missions carry labels such as TAKING BACK LUDLOW and BATTLE OF ST. ALBANS, and a rival timeline-altering force called “The Precept” is introduced in the story scenes.
Story beats play out in cinematic dialogue scenes rather than cutscene-free exposition, including a carriage conversation where the mission against Henry V is laid out. Which faction you back is not fixed, and the campaign is designed to end in more than one way.
Kingmakers key details
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Developer | Redemption Road |
| Publisher | tinyBuild |
| Engine | Custom Unreal Engine 4 build |
| Platform | Windows (PC) |
| Genre | Action, simulation, strategy |
| Modes | Single-player, online co-op (up to 4) |
| Campaign length | Roughly 30–40 hours |
| Release date | Coming soon; no date confirmed |
The engine work is the reason the scale claims hold up. It is tuned to push both CPU and GPU hard so that tens of thousands of soldiers can fight at once, each one running its own decision-making, pathfinding, and loyalty logic alongside a procedural animation system.
Switching between third-person combat and strategy view
There is no loading screen or separate mode select between the shooter and the strategy layer. You can be sprinting toward a building in third person, pull back to the overhead map, place a structure or redirect a legion, and drop straight back into the fight.
In the overhead view, friendly and enemy units show as blue and red ground markers, buildings snap to a green placement grid, and orders can be issued unit by unit or delegated to petty officers. Archers, spearmen, swordsmen, cavalry, and levied berserkers all take orders from the same interface, and units carry levels such as Archers Level 3.
Hold Shift and use the mouse wheel to rotate a structure before you place it.
Temporal Shop: how to buy modern weapons with medieval loot
Your gear is not scavenged from the past. Everything modern is bought in the present with wealth you send forward through time, which makes looting castles a supply run rather than a side activity.
Weapons seen in the shop include the Lever Action Shotgun, Sawn Off Shotgun, M1928 Carbine Scoped, M16A2, SVD, Uzi, P220, Molotov, Sledgehammer, and Scythe. Grenade launchers and miniguns sit at the heavier end, while vehicles run from dirt bikes and cars to trucks and tanks. Tactical support covers automated turrets and airstrikes.
Stowed guns reload themselves. The game explains it as spending a little temporal bandwidth on your behalf, so you do not have to manage reserve magazines.
Building settlements and managing resources
Settlements are built from the overhead view, usually in territory that is still hostile. The economy chain is short and readable. Peasant housing supplies workers, farms produce food, lumber mills next to woodland produce wood, and silver mines feed the treasury.
Placement rules are strict, and the game tells you when you have broken one with prompts such as Cannot Build On Farmland and Must Build Next To Forest, Not Within. Once a lumber mill goes up correctly, an on-screen message confirms it is running and points you toward pairing it with a silver mine and a farm.
Beyond the economy, construction covers defense and unlocks.
- Blacksmith, which opens the tech tree and army upgrades.
- Walls and gates to funnel attackers.
- Archer towers for ranged cover.
- Ballistas and trebuchets for siege defense.
Structures are not scenery. Large buildings such as cathedrals have fully navigable interiors you can fight inside, and buildings, gates, and trees can be destroyed outright by rockets, tanks, or siege engines.
Army morale, loyalty, and captured officers
Soldiers on both sides act on morale rather than fighting to the last man. Kill a high-ranking enemy officer and the effect cascades through the men around him, which can tip an entire formation into a retreat without you clearing the field yourself. Named officers such as Sir Hastings, Sir Mortimer, and Sir Churchill appear with red nameplates and health bars above them.
Armor matters too. Elite knights can deflect low-caliber rounds with their shields and plate, so a pistol or submachine gun will stop being enough and you will need heavier purchases from the shop.
Officers you wound can be captured instead of killed, and you then pick one of three outcomes.
- Ransom him back for gold.
- Torture him for information.
- Execute him to raise your own army’s morale.
Character progression and army upgrades
Battles award experience points that go into permanent upgrades for your character class. Those upgrades unlock new weapons and abilities for you, and improvements that carry over to the soldiers under your command, so progress made in one mission does not reset when the next one starts.
Co-op: four players, four armies
The entire campaign can be played solo or with up to four players online, and the co-op is drop-in, drop-out rather than a separate mode. Each player commands their own army, so a defense can have one player holding a wall in third person while another repositions cavalry from the overhead view. Player name tags appear in green above teammates.
Kingmakers release status and playtest access
The game is still listed as coming soon, with no release date confirmed. It was first announced in February 2024, was later lined up for early access, and missed an October 8th, 2025 date after the developers posted a message about the delay. A playable public demo was shown at Bilibili World in July 2026.
There is a playtest you can queue for. Request access from the Kingmakers page on Steam, and you will be notified when the developers open more slots. Wishlisting on the same page is what triggers the release notification.
Listed features include single-player, online co-op, Steam Achievements, and Family Sharing, with full English audio and subtitles in ten languages. System requirements currently specify only a 64-bit processor and Windows 10, so the final performance targets for those massive battles are still to come.
