During Future Games Show 2025, developer Redemption Road took the spotlight to showcase its upcoming action strategy hybrid game Kingmakers. While the trailer features footage we’ve seen before, it features developer Ian Fisch giving us quite a few bits of new information about the title, including the fact that it is being developed using Unreal Engine 4. Check out the trailer below.
According to Fisch, the story of Kingmakers revolves around a modern-day soldier being sent back in time to 1401 to take part in the Welsh Rebellion of the time. While the real-world version of the rebellion was defeated, with its leader Owain Glyndŵr disappearing under mysterious circumstances, Kingmakers will have players, armed with assault rifles and tanks, lead the rebellion to victory in their quest to conquer England.
Fisch points out that one of the key features of Kingmakers will be that the thousands of soldiers that players take on in any of the game’s levels will all be fully simulated. He compared this to a game like Dynasty Warriors, which tends to spawn in fresh soldiers to fight when players get close. Instead, all the soldiers will be in the battlefield right from the beginning of the level, with each one playing their part in the fight.
Buildings will also be fully navigable and destructible. This can lead to hordes of soldiers being able to storm a massive castle which features complex architecture across its multiple floors. Fisch promises the same level of pathfinding and fidelity that players expect from modern shooters.
“Originally, we thought Kingmakers was going to be a cool simulation of what it would be like to go back in time with modern weapons,” says Fisch in the trailer. “Would you be able to defeat a medieval army with an AK-47? Then we realised that if we’re going to do this, we’ve got to do it right. Medieval battles involve thousands of soldiers, so we’re going to simulate thousands of soldiers.”
He also revealed that the idea to add real-time strategy game mechanics to Kingmakers came about because the studio figured that, with battles of massive scopes taking place, players would want to command their own armies. This led to the studio adding building and army recruitment mechanics to what was originally going to be a more standard action game.
Fisch goes on to describe Kingmakers as “a shooter with real-time strategy mechanics that rival Age of Empires, and shooting gameplay that rivals Helldivers and Space Marine.”
When it comes to the destructible buildings in Kingmakers, Fisch mentions that players have a wide range of ways in how they can raze the structures. Players can use grenade launchers, call in airstrikes, or even just drive through buildings in a heavily-armoured tank. The destruction is all supposed to be dynamic, with no strictly-scripted building collapses in the game.
Fisch notes that the studio decided to develop Kingmakers using Unreal Engine 4 over its more recent iterations primarily because of how the engine handles physics. While Unreal Engine 5 has plenty of new features that developers could use, according to Fisch, none of the newer versions of the engine could match the processing speed required for the physics simulation in Kingmakers that was provided by Unreal Engine 4.
Along with all of this, Kingmakers will also feature co-op multiplayer for up to four players for the entirety of the campaign. This includes all mechanics, including the RTS ones where each player will be able to field their own armies.
Kingmakers will be coming to PC as an Early Access game. While there is no release date, Fisch also notes that the title will eventually also come to consoles.
