The Kindred is an early access creative sandbox survival game where you try to upstart a civilisation from the bare essentials.

Most of you will look at this and think how it is very similar to Stonehearth, which is true. It has it’s similarities. That being said The Kindred manages to do a lot of things Stonehearth did, but way better. The crafting and building system is far more efficient, making for a much more relaxing experience. The way that the “Kin” work when you design a building is far more advanced as they will mine for what they need and craft what they need to build your design, providing less hassling micro-management.

The overall objective of The Kindred is to create a small village from nothing and sprite it up into a civilisation. You manage your Kin, which are your villagers, in order to manage resources, build structures and farm animals and crops. You will have to build power networks, plant food, and herd & breed animals. Anything that helps with the overall objective of keeping the Kin alive and managing your resources.

Performance wise The Kindred is by far one of the best early access games as it runs so smoothly, shy of few camera issues and a slight knock after an auto-save or two. The Kindred can handle 50 Kins doing their jobs without any drop whatsoever.

The questionable modern art style is something of an acquired taste but I think that it has a nice change of pace from it’s similar brethren and the wind generators and electricity as a whole are great and give the clean lines a nice fit for the style that was chosen.

On the other hand it is early access and an early access game without any problems is unheard of to this day. The Kindred isn’t going to be number 1 for that. There are a lot of simple interface options that don’t always work. Tool-tips will bug out and not appear, making the resources you need for an item or building hard to see. The work assignment menu is very cluttered and needs cleaning up a bit. When you are in the build menu it is easy to miss/not there when the notification for Kin growing old/being born pops up so the UI in general does need a bit of a clean up/rework.

Lastly the difficulty is almost non-existent as there are no enemies of any kind and the resources are abundant. Predators will hunt your livestock but they are hardly an issue and to be honest the peaceful mode of The Kindred is quite a delight.