Kingmakers Combines Back to the Future With Army of Darkness and It’s Blowing Up Right Now – IGN Next

Kingmakers was announced just a little over two weeks ago, but all of IGN’s audience metric data suggests that it might soon follow Palworld and Helldivers 2 as a huge breakout sensation.

So why do we think it’s about to blow up?

• With nearly 11M views across IGN’s social media channels, Kingmakers is the most-watched video game trailer on IGN social so far this year.
• Kingmakers is also one of the most viewed new games in 2024 so far across IGN’s YouTube channels, racking up over 1.1 million views with just two trailers.
• It’s the 55th most wishlisted game on Steam as of this writing – and it’s climbing.

If you’re not yet familiar with this rising star on the gaming scene, here’s what you need to know: The time-traveling action-adventure/strategy hybrid from developer Redemption Road, who previously created the Road Rash spiritual successor Road Redemption, sees you go back in time in your beat-up station wagon to medieval times, where you use all kinds of modern tools like guns, grenades, attack helicopters, and more to violently change the course of history. If you described it as Back to the Future meets Army of Darkness, you wouldn’t be too far off. And as a cherry on top, it’s playable in co-op mode. It’s due out in Steam Early Access later this year. Wishlist it if you’re interested.

Kingmakers has been in development for over four years and uses Unreal Engine to make its massive crowds a reality. The 20-person team cites a number of games as influences: the Mount and Blade series, Deeprock Galactic, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Chivalry, Stronghold series, and World War Z, among others.

If you haven’t already seen IGN’s exclusive FanFest 2024 trailer, you should make like a tree and get outta here to correct that immediately (or just click on the video above). We’ll have much more on Kingmakers in the coming months as the Redemption Road team works towards an Early Access release.

IGN Next is something new on IGN; we’ll be spotlighting games that light up our charts that we think you’ll be interested in. Stay tuned for more IGN Next posts soon!

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.