Overview
Giant Kings adds the ability to create factions led by a giant. However, it also expands the world in which you play quite a bit. Some of these additions are mechanical in the form of Fated Regions and Landmarks, while others are simple beautifications to the world generation.
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As with every expansion, Giant Kings also launched with a free update called the Ogre update that gave the Feudal Culture a much-needed rework. I’ll go over a few details of that update in this review as well.
| Gideon’s Bias | Giant Kings Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: Paradox Interactive |
| Hours Played: 20+ | Type: Expansion DLC |
| Reviewed On: Xbox Series X | Platforms: PC, Xbox Series S/X, PlayStation 5 |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: 4X, Turn based Strategy |
| Mode Played: Variety | Price: $24.99 |
Fe Fi Fo Fum
The expansion’s namesake feature is the ability to rule your faction as a Giant King. Much like Dragons, Giants are powerhouses, but they do come with an initial mana upkeep that grows alongside your Giant.
Giants come in four flavors: Frost, Storm, Fire, and Earth. Each one dictates their elemental damage and a preferred terrain type that gives bonuses to your faction. Furthermore, they have the ability to summon runes in a region that begins terraforming the area to their matching terrain type. One neat feature is that you don’t need to own the province to cast it there. Aggressive terraforming is now an option.
Something I like about Giant Kings is that they aren’t one-note, they can be molded into a variety of playstyles. You can make them into brutes, spell casters, or even artisans in a way. One particular skill tree opens up exclusive bonuses you can use in the item forge, for example.
The Giants themselves can throw boulders and have area attacks with their weapons, making them excellent against clustered armies. If you choose the skills to do so, they can also summon floating weaponry to fight for them.
Giant Kings opens up even more roleplaying possibilities for factions and comes with the mechanical variance to match. You can make multiple factions with the same element Giant King, and play them very differently. The only connecting factor between them is that you will need to account for their additional mana costs, but that’s a fair trade in return for a versatile and imposing ruler.
I also found it interesting that Dragons and Giants have an inherent dislike for each other that affects your relations with Dragon-ruled factions. It’s a nice little twist when you have both Dragon’s Dawn and Giant Kings.
Giant Kings are a great fifth option for rulers. They had the potential to overlap with dragons as a powerhouse, but they do their own thing in their own way, and I found them to be very enjoyable to play.
Shifting World
The generated worlds in which you play Age of Wonders 4 are pretty important, and Giant Kings breathes some new life into them in a few ways. Firstly, there are hand-crafted regions, which are basically just beautified areas that can appear to give more personality to the world but have no effect on gameplay.
Next up are Fated Regions. These regions have quest chains inside them that offer various choices to make and can earn you rewards, including brand-new artifacts that have faction-wide effects and can open up new win conditions. New options to take on more quests and take part in more battles are always a good thing in Age of Wonders 4.
There are also landmark regions, large chunks of land that represent a very visible landmark. They are similar to natural wonders in the Civilization series. These regions grant bonuses to all provinces adjacent to them, with a big bonus to any city with three or more provinces adjacent to them. For example, there is one landmark that grants bonus gold to nearby provinces but also allows you to recruit dragons if you have three or more.
Landmarks are a great addition because they present a powerful area of contention to battle over, and the AI will absolutely beeline to those landmarks when they can. The boons they offer are well worth the effort to obtain, and it’s always exciting when you find one.
There are also Crystal dwellings, which are similar to the Umbral Dwellings found in Eldritch Realms but less outwardly hostile. They can give you quests to earn favor with them and offer exclusive Crystal units and spells in return. The Crystal Dwellings give you yet another avenue to make choices during the game. Both Landmarks and Crystal dwellings need to be enabled in realm generation, so you can choose to play without them if you want.
Finally, I feel like I’ve been complaining about the lack of new wonders in every single expansion review I’ve done. Giant Kings has heard my cries and added two new ones. Would I prefer more? Absolutely, but the new additions do add more variety to a spot of the game that sorely needed it.
Giant Kings adds a lot more depth to an often undercooked character in games, the world itself.
New Tomes & Other Additions
Giant Kings adds two new tomes. The Tome of Dungeon Depths is a tome purely focused on the underground. It can turn regions into Dungeons with various bonuses and allows you to create Clay Soldiers, a very powerful set of units that get stronger when together with other Clay Units. It’s really nice to finally have a tome fully focused on underground gameplay.
Then there is the Tome of Geomancy, a tome that can give your faction bonuses based on the terrain they are standing on. It plays well with the elemental terraforming theme of Giant Kings as well as the Primal Culture that was introduced with Primal Fury.
Beyond that, there are a lot of smaller additions that matter. There are new units to recruit and encounter, primarily regarding the Crystal Dwelling, but also powerful primordial creatures that are difficult to obtain but incredibly strong. Shopkeepers can also appear in your regions, and they allow you to buy things like Traits, map knowledge, and mounts, even for your whole army.
All of it makes each game even more dynamic and full of options. As Age of Wonders 4 grows with every expansion, your choices grow in meaningful ways because you can never do everything in a single match, but you aren’t supposed to. It’s best to think of a theme or even a back story for your faction and let that guide your decisions alongside the strategic nature of the game. It works really well, and Giant Kings continues the trend of really leaning on that creative strength.
Ogre Update
The free Ogre update makes a lot of really nice changes to the game. The update introduces several new combat maps and new adventures for existing ancient wonders. It also updates the underground for better playability. Furthermore, it adds new items to the Pantheon tree, including a new society trait that focuses on being an underground faction
Sieges have been reworked to take less time, and the Item Forge has been redone to require new fragments for higher-tier items. You primarily gain those fragments by disenchanting high-tier items. It’s a solid balance change.
The big one, however, is the Feudal Culture rework, something the game desperately needed. The Feudal Culture now has two subtypes, Monarchy and Aristocracy, each with gameplay differences. A Monarchy gives bonuses to armies battling in friendly territory or with their ruler, while an Aristocracy splits up each city into individual houses led by the governing hero. Furthermore, spells and units have been redone. Peasant Pikemen are now a summon and no longer turn into Defenders. However, Bows can evolve into Long Bows, and Aspirant Knights into Knights. Knights are the only existing tier 4 culture units in the game, and can only be obtained by leveling up a knight aspirant.
The rework not only makes the Feudal Culture more fun to play, it grants it a personality it had been lacking since the game was released. The decision to be a Monarchy or Aristocracy has both gameplay and thematic ramifications. I’ll always applaud this type of rework in a free update, and that’s why I’ll continue to mention them in my reviews.
Verdict
Giant Kings adds a great deal of essence to the game’s soul. While the Giant rulers stand out the most and are a great new ruler type. It’s the less obvious additions that really make the expansion great. Crystal Dwellings, Fated Regions, handcrafted beautification, and landmarks really expand the dynamic nature of the maps you play on, while additions like Shop Keepers are just neat little options you can use to your advantage or ignore altogether.
While only two new tomes are present, one of them fills the underground playstyle gap, while the second one is just plain fun to use.
Giant King’s is admittedly on the pricier end of an expansion that doesn’t add a new culture. But I do find the additions significant enough that I’d never want to go back to playing without them. I think it, alongside the rest of the expansions, does raise the bar for the final expansion that has been announced, Archons Prophecy, mostly because I can’t think of any new additions that Age of Wonders 4 needs, except for a few more ancient wonders, of course.
