The Keflings have returned, a whole world of them.

User Rating: 8 | A World of Keflings X360
A Kingdom for Keflings was one of the first XBLA games designed to let you use your own avatar as the playable character. You walked around the land picking up Keflings and assigning them jobs, bringing resources in to shops so that you could construct buildings. A World of Keflings plays identical to its previous version, this time introducing new zones and themes such as Ice and Desert.

Keflings are pretty small, and buildings are pretty big. It's rather hard to build a Kingdom in a day when you're vertically challenged. That's where you come in, (insert Xbox Live tag name here). The Kelfings look up to you, not just literally, but they also need you to guide them on what to do. When you reach the Forest Kingdom, you'll meet a king who has no castle, and it will be your ultimate goal to culminate the denizens of the kingdom to build him that fine castle every king deserves.

You start the game out in the frozen lands of the Ice Kingdom. A World of Keflings is made up of three zones. Ice, Forest and Desert, and in order to transport to another zone, you have to develop the kingdom the point where you're offered a piece of the teleport gate to fix. Every zone starts out the same. There are a few wandering Keflings looking for work to do, and there are workshops that are devoid of resources. Pick up Keflings and drop them on forests and ore deposits and then drop other Keflings on the piles they produce. Carry them to workshops and refineries and they'll transport the goods for you while you tend to other things.

The goal of every zone is to fully the develop the chief's hut, the king's castle or the sultan's palace. To do so, you have a series of blueprints that must be built in order. Your most important buildings are of course the Kefling homes. Go to a workshop or factory, select the appropriate pieces to assemble, and lay them out according to the blueprint and the pieces will magically form into a building. You'll then need to place Love, which is represented by a heart, into the home and out sprouts some new Keflings ready to go to work.

More advanced buildings and factories will require refined resources, so you may need to divert your transporters to deliver logs to lumber mills and rocks to stone cutters. As you progress further in the game, you'll need to build traders that will be able to bring in resources from other kingdoms that you can't produce locally. Some factories and shops will require educated Keflings, so you'll need to build schools.

There are special Keflings bearing their own names that will follow you around and help you transport the materials needed for a building. They'll also help you transport stockpiles of resources from one shop to another. This greatly cuts down on the amount of traveling you have to do. Their most handy attribute is automatically assembling a building you've already built before, so all you need to do is lay down the first piece. Other important Keflings, such as the Witch and Pirate will have you perform special quests that involve looking for an important item, or interacting with the common Keflings. They'll often reward you with more Love so that you can build more houses and get more Keflings.

To interact with your Keflings, you're given a number of emotes that you can perform. These range from simple whistles that gather any Kefling without a job to you, to dancing emotes that draw the entire crowd of Keflings your way. You might see a Kefling with a flashing up arrow above his head, and this means its time to level him up by smacking the top of his head. Leveling up Keflings increases the speed of their work as well as their ability to haul more resources.

Although the nature of A World of Keflings is very relaxing, it can be frustrating at times to get them to do exactly what you want. When you try to change jobs for a Kefling, he might end up going right back to what he was doing before. You'll have to pick him up again, take off his current hat and try once more. When your kingdom is bustling, it becomes even harder to pick up the exact Kefling you want, especially when he's on the move. There's also no way of knowing exactly where your transporter Kefling is going unless you follow him to his destination. A better micromanagement system would have helped make the game easier to play. Also, a glitch has been noticed where a transporter Kefling refused to pick up glass from the glass refinery and deliver it another workshop.

Graphically, A World of Keflings is easy on the eyes. It's a colorful game, and everything's rendered rather well. The Keflings have cute animations, and of course your avatar looks exactly as it does in your Xbox Live profile. Special effects are nothing really noteworthy, but the nature of the game doesn't require much flash. The cutscenes are done in a neat way; the action's paused and the camera merely roams around the subjects. The only major flaw to the game's visuals is that the frame rate dips when there's a lot of action onscreen.

The game's audio compliments the visuals very well. Buildings whip together with a gentle poof. You can hear your Keflings working away on lumber and mining to their hearts' content. The music of the game is rather easygoing, conveying an atmosphere of relaxation very well. You can even set up a network of cannons in the Forest Kingdom that produce customizable notes when you fire a Kefling from them. If you're so inclined, you can make your own background audio just using these cannons. The voice acting is cute and charming, featuring nothing but nonsensical blathering from the main Keflings.

We all need breaks from shooting aliens and zombies with our shotguns and Nazis from 100 yards with our sniper rifles. Games like A World of Keflings allows us to slow down and enjoy gaming at a leisurely pace. A World of Keflings may not be the deepest game of its genre, but it isn't trying to be. It's just a laid back game where you can watch your civilization of Keflings turn a world of trees and rock into a thriving city. It's warm and welcome and very, very addictive. It's not without its own share of faults, though, but unlike most games, there's nothing here to penalize you for them. You simply can just get lost in your own little world of Keflings.