It’s hard for me not to get carried away by the pleasant medieval music that greets me in the main menu. Beautiful art and fantastic opportunities to customize my experience are the premise of Manor Lords, a medieval city builder, and it shows when you paint your weapon (or shield) with a rich selection of colors and settings. Crusader Kings 3 features a similar system, and aside from that game, I’ve rarely seen such a complete system for something that’s essentially just an icon. What makes it unique? The developers of the project have made it very clear that it cannot be compared with, for example, Total War or Cities: Skylines.
Even though the real-time battles are similar, I can say that Manor Lords is primarily a city builder, not unlike Anno, Tropico, The Settlers or Banished. It’s very slow, even for the genre, for better or worse, and like The Settlers, the game more or less begins with watching workers transport resources from one place to another. First, trees are cut down and turned into planks before being transported by another worker to build a structure and start growing your city. These residents aren’t just a number, they wander the world, living, aging and dying, and this level of detail adds a lot to the experience.
Slavic Magic has put a lot of work into this project and it shows not only in the music and art, but also in the graphics and game systems, which are above and beyond what you would expect from an independent project. This concern affects me because the well-designed systems mean I care about the community I’m building in the game. Even if the cities eventually grow with castles and walls, the most important thing is still the journey there. Memories are created all the time, like building your first church or solving hunger problems. Just like in Anno 1800 or Dungeon Keeper, you can walk around your world and look at its buildings in detail. Thanks to the graphics, the seasons and the day and night cycle, it looks like a real place, and depending on what you build or have your workers produce, the cities look different. You can create more specialized or diverse communities. You choose.
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It is important to remember that you are taking over territories to further your city’s development, as more territory gives you more opportunities to acquire more resources. It’s a bit similar to the Cities: Skylines system, where you acquire new areas to build, although you won’t be building multiple cities in the same area or at the scale of the aforementioned series. I’m very happy with the presentation and the way it adds to the gameplay. For example, seasons affect harvests, what your villagers do, what the environment looks like, and which resources are most in demand. When the snow subsides, you can really feel the joy of spring, even if it’s just a game.
Another important pillar is the user interface and the structure menus. I don’t like the icons in the buildings menu and think that icons are needed to distinguish the buildings instead of a picture of the houses. You currently have five or more images of buildings with a similar appearance, which creates unnecessary confusion and you have to hover over buildings to use the information panels to clearly see what you want to build. However, it’s easy to draw areas and place works, as well as decide how many buildings to build or which tech tree to invest in to get more tools to create the city of your dreams.
Battles, which were an important part of the marketing, are not as important an aspect as you might initially think, as it takes time for the city to grow to the point where you can produce soldiers from its residents. You must be of a certain age and male. They must also control the weapons and equipment they carry, such as: B. Make your own armor. You can also hire mercenaries to help you in battles for money. These battles take place in real time inside or outside of cities, where you control soldiers similar to Total War, albeit with some more advanced tools, and I was impressed by how you can slowly withdraw your troops to lure the enemy into traps. You move columns of troops, order the infantry to charge and the archers to fire their arrows – all seamless and well presented. However, don’t expect this to be the focus or to be able to do it right away, as it took many hours before I was able to fight and command armies large enough to employ complicated strategies.
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Strategically, you have countless options for building your communities. It reminds me a lot of the “Anno” series in the sense that sooner or later you will be able to collect all the possible resources you need to “win”, even if you become more specialized in something and sells this item to AI-controlled humans through system trading. But here, as with almost all competitors, lie the title’s biggest problems. The game ends almost suddenly and without much of a conclusion. Maybe the developers should look for something similar to the upcoming Frostpunk 2 or find their own ways to make the final part of the game more interesting.
Overall, however, Manor Lords is a fantastically put together city-building game for those with some patience and an interest in history. It’s more reminiscent of The Settlers and Banished than something like SimCity, but at the same time there are battles in certain situations that are reminiscent of Total War, but it’s still a game in its own right. It features enchanting music, a vibrant world and a charming simulation of medieval societies. I don’t think it’s quite perfect, as it’s noticeably lacking in maps and missing certain gameplay elements that are still in development, but it’s still an incredibly promising game in its genre. Even the lack of activities at the end of the campaign doesn’t stop the journey there from being great. I would always be reluctant to recommend purchasing Early Access, but Manor Lords makes it difficult to live up to that principle, especially if the developers maintain their passion and build on it through to full release, as this could be a true masterpiece of its genre could . At the moment he is very good and has great potential.
