"We're obsessed": After quietly dropping the best trailer of 2024, bizarre-o strategy game shows off incredible destruction tech – "If you drive a car full speed into a medieval tavern, well..."

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Time-traveling medieval warfare with destruction physics like this? Yes please

Kingmakers
(Image credit: Redemption Road)

Kingmakers debuted to the world with an absolutely wild reveal trailer that seems to have cemented the game's destiny as an inescapable viral hit. It's an action-strategy game where you play as a time-traveling commander who can bring all sorts of modern weapons back to the medieval world, and the devs have just upped the ante by showing off some genuinely incredible looking destruction tech.

"With Kingmakers, we're obsessed with making everything interactable," creative director Ian Fisch says on Twitter, sharing a clip of a car crashing headlong into a wooden building. "If you drive a car full speed into a medieval tavern, well...." To be honest, I think an actual car would be a little worse for wear after careening headlong into a bunch of oak longs, but damn if the way that building crumbles doesn't look incredibly satisfying.

That clip originates from a trailer released last week, confirming that Kingmakers is due to hit early access in the first quarter of 2025. The full trailer, which you can see below, also shows off numerous other examples of the destruction tech. We see a grenade launcher fell a castle arch, cutting off a gaggle of enemy soldiers, an RPG blow a hole in a fortified wall, and a floor destroyed to offer a better vantage point on the enemies sitting below.

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Once upon a time, fully destructible environments felt like they'd be the final frontier of video game technology, but these days it's mostly indie games with wild concepts like Kingmakers that are keeping the dream of destruction alive. Here's hoping Kingmakers turns out well, because if it's half as fun as it looks we could be in for something special.

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Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.