Kingmakers

Overview

Kingmakers is an action-strategy sandbox game developed by Redemption Road Games and published by tinyBuild. Set in 1400 AD during the Welsh Rebellion, the game sends players back 500 years in time with modern military hardware to fight alongside medieval armies, command thousands of soldiers, and change the course of history. Kingmakers blends two genres that rarely share the same screen: on-the-ground third-person shooter combat and top-down real-time strategy command. Players can swap between these two modes at any point during gameplay with no loading screen or pause, making the transition feel seamless.

The game's premise is simple on its face but opens up enormous gameplay possibilities. You are part of a team of scientists who have invented a time machine. You get sent 500 years into the past to restore an original timeline that was altered by a malevolent force. In practice, this means you bring assault rifles, tanks, and attack helicopters into a world that has never seen anything more advanced than a trebuchet. The result is a game that can shift from a serious strategic campaign to gleeful chaos in seconds, and both sides of that coin are fully intentional.

Key Details

Concept and Premise

The central concept of Kingmakers revolves around time travel. In the game's lore, the original course of history saw Owain Glyndwr's Welsh Rebellion succeed, unifying Britain under Welsh leadership and producing a technologically superior civilization. A malevolent otherworldly force intervened and changed that outcome, causing the rebellion to fail. The player's present day exists in this weakened, altered timeline, and an elite operator is sent back to 1400 AD to set things right. The player works alongside historical figures like Owain Glyndwr while fighting against Henry IV and his son Henry V.

This setup gives the developers a plausible excuse to drop modern military hardware into a medieval war. But the game goes beyond simple wish fulfillment. Players must also manage kingdomsbuild settlements, establish supply lines, and make political choices that affect which factions support them. The faction system allows players to fight for England, Scotland, or Wales, each path offering different alliances, enemies, and story outcomes. The campaign features multiple endings, and decisions made along the way (including how prisoners are treated) shape the narrative.

The player character is not a trained soldier in the traditional sense. preview, you are a member of a team of scientists trying to figure out what in the past led to the current-day apocalypse. Your team's time machine lets them see the world shift and change around them due to decisions made in the past, and they learn they must unite England, Wales, Scotland, and "a little bit of Ireland" to prevent a terrible future. The futuristic ending teased in one trailer. This shows a city with cat-shaped floating ships, reportedly has darker elements than it first appears.

Gameplay

Kingmakers splits its gameplay into two tightly integrated modes that players switch between freely. In the third-person shooter mode, the player controls their character directly and uses a wide range of modern weapons against medieval opponents. Assault rifles, sniper rifles, SMGs, shotguns, pistols, grenade launchers, RPGs, a modern compound bow, a rapid-fire crossbow, and more are all available. A sledgehammer replaced the original sword for melee, since the developers realized that swinging a sword at plate armor is not very effective compared to a heavy blunt impact that staggers armored officers. A buckler shield stays on the player's arm while holding a gun, allowing them to parry attacks and arrows without being weighed down.

In strategy modethe camera rises to a top-down view and the game becomes a real-time strategy experience. Players command up to roughly 4,000 NPC soldiers at once, with the engine capable of pushing toward 8,000 under optimal conditions. Six distinct medieval unit types ship at Early Access launch: Swordsmen, Spearmen, Cavalry, Archers, Berserkers, and Men-at-Arms. Each follows a rock-paper-scissors balance system and can be upgraded through multiple tiers. A full skill tree powered by collectible holy relics provides further enhancement.

The vehicle roster at Early Access includes three drivable options: a motorcycle/dirt bike, a convertible car (chosen over the pickup truck from the announcement trailer because it allows 360-degree shooting), and a tank. Air support arrives via an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter equipped with an M230 Chain Gun and F-16 airstrikes that work on a designate-and-wait system comparable to the airstrike mechanic from Helldivers 2. Armored SUVs and a Humvee with a mounted M2HB.50 caliber heavy machine gun also appear. All vehicles interact with the physics-driven destructible environmentsso driving a tank through a castle wall creates a real breach rather than triggering a canned animation.

Kingdom building forms the third pillar of gameplay. Between battles, players construct settlements, economy buildings, production facilities, research buildings, and fortifications. Resources like copper, gold, and hidden treasures gathered in 1400 AD get sent forward to the future as currency for unlocking modern equipment and upgrades. The future is described as being in rough shape with limited resources, so requesting new guns is not a trivial request. Supply lines must be maintained for both arrows and ammunition, and populations spanning different levels of technological understanding must be managed.

Technology

Redemption Road Games built Kingmakers on Unreal Engine 4.27, not UE5. Lead Coder Ian Fisch has explained that UE4.27 handles the physics processing required for their simulation more efficiently than UE5 could at the scale they need. The entire codebase is written in C++ and HLSL. To render thousands of soldiers without destroying frame rates, the team developed a custom GPU shader-based animation system. The CPU sees every NPC in a T-pose, while a GPU shader handles all the actual animation work. Distant soldiers use vertex animations for performance, switching to full skeletal animation when the camera gets close enough for the player to notice.

This approach is what allows the game to field roughly 4,000 soldiers (potentially up to 8,000) while still targeting 60 frames per second on mid-range hardware without relying on frame generation. DLSS is supported for players who want the additional performance headroom. The AI controlling every soldier is described as next-gen multi-threaded, managing decision-making, pathfinding, and loyalty as individual attributes. The developers have compared the unit behavior to Mount and Blade rather than Total War, noting that their soldiers are "fully individual and AI-driven" rather than moving in preset formation blocks.

Development History

Kingmakers has been in development for over five years. Redemption Road Games was founded by brothers Ian Fisch (Lead Coder) and Paul Fisch (Game Director). The studio was previously known under the names EQ Games and Pixel Dash Studios when they developed Road Redemption, a spiritual successor to the Road Rash racing series that raised over $173,000 on Kickstarter against a $160,000 goal. The studio operates out of offices in Atlanta, Georgia, and Los Angeles, California, with a core team of roughly 20 developers. Other key team members include co-founder and programmer Daniel Balazs and programmer Trace Myers.

The game was first announced by tinyBuild on February 20, 2024, and the announcement trailer immediately went viral. it "the biggest gaming surprise we've seen in 2024" and published a detailed tech interview with the developers. The game was nominated for Best Game Trailer at the Golden Joystick Awards 2024. A gameplay tweet posted by the developers accumulated over 18 million views. The studio reported nearly 100,000 signups for their playtest program.

Kingmakers was originally scheduled to enter Early Access on October 8, 2025, but Redemption Road Games delayed it just five days before launch. The delay announcement emphasized that the game is "incredibly ambitious" and the team did not want to cut any planned features for the sake of hitting a deadline. Based on an early 2026 post on X (formerly Twitter), the studio's internal target shifted to around May 2026, though no firm date has been confirmed publicly. Monthly NDA playtests are organized through the game's official Discord server, and the developers have indicated they plan to release an open beta or demo before the full Early Access launch.

Cut Content

During development, the team prototyped a giant cyborg mech, described as a "titan unit" that would march around the battlefield and move soldiers out of the way. Game Director Paul Fisch revealed in an Edge Magazine interview that after playing with the idea, "we discovered that was too much. It was immersion breaking. Ultimately, it broke the fantasy." The irony of a game about bringing assault rifles to a sword fight drawing the line at a mech was not lost on gaming media, which covered the story widely.

Reception and Anticipation

Before its release, Kingmakers crossed over one million wishlists on Steam, reaching the number seven spot on the platform's most-wishlisted games list. The announcement trailer has accumulated over 931,000 views on YouTube. The Golden Joystick Awards 2024 nominated it for Best Game Trailer. endorsement and subsequent tech analysis brought significant attention from the performance-focused PC gaming audience. The combination of a high-concept premise, impressive technical execution, and the developers' transparent communication style through devblogs and Discord has built a dedicated community waiting for the game's launch.

Film Adaptation

In December 2025, Netflix acquired a feature pitch based on Kingmakers. The screenplay is being written by Christopher MacBride, a Canadian writer-director known for Flashback (2021) starring Dylan O'Brien and Maika Monroe. Shawn Levy and Dan Levine of 21 Laps Entertainment are attached as producers alongside Dmitri M. Johnson, Michael Lawrence Goldberg, and Timothy I. Stevenson of Story Kitchen. Netflix leveraged its existing creative partnership with 21 Laps to take the project off the market preemptively. Story Kitchen brokered the original deal connecting Redemption Road Games with the production team. The film adaptation was announced well before the game's release, an indicator of how much attention the concept has attracted outside the gaming industry.

Design Inspirations

The developers have openly discussed the games that influenced Kingmakers across its multiple genre pillars. On the strategy side, Mount and Blade, Crusader Kings, Stronghold, They Are Billions, and Total War shaped the army command, kingdom management, and siege systems. The cooperative multiplayer took cues from Deep Rock Galactic, Vermintide 2, Valheim, and Rust. The medieval combat and world-building draw from Chivalry and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. The horde-style pressure of defending against huge numbers of enemies was influenced by World War Z. The overall tone, which mixes genuine strategic depth with absurdist humor, has been repeatedly compared to the 1992 film Army of Darkness.

Post-Early Access Roadmap

The planned roadmap for content beyond the initial Early Access launch is extensive. New factions, including Scottish and French forces, are on the list. PvP multiplayer modes may be added if there is strong community demand, though anti-cheat implementation is the primary blocker. Pilotable helicopters and planes would add a full aerial combat dimension. Flamethrowers and incendiary bombs are being explored for area-denial fire attacks. A combat drone that follows the player is in the works but is unlikely to make the Early Access build. AI improvements through machine learning, Steam Workshop support for community mods, and crossplay between PC and consoles are all part of the longer-term plan. Controller support has been confirmed for the future. The scope of the roadmap suggests the developers intend for Early Access to last a substantial period as these features ship incrementally.