Medieval Dynasty Reviews

Great to play with friends. Tried playing this single player and hated it. Co-op mode allows you to enable settings like fast builds, adjust the amount of harm animals can do to players, disable carry weight limit, and many other features that make the game customizable to your liking. It takes awhile to get into swing of building and maintaining village, but after awhile it becomes second-nature. I enjoy the crafting system. Main quest lines are usually interesting and sometimes comical. Seasonal side quests can be repetitive at times. Combat system with bandits is not well developed. Hunting system is well-developed. It is really difficult to get village to be self-sufficient and it does require some micromanaging to keep the settlement running smoothly. Overall enjoyable but because of the amount of materials needed to build/craft, and the short season length, progress was very slow and tedious on single player mode. Highly recommend playing co-op.

This game is overall quite fun, although there are many bugs, building villages, getting married and having children, these gameplay are very good.

the village management from a first person perspective is done really well and the pacing is fine, but it lacks a bit in customizations and endgame content

This is a great time with friends. It's also a great time solo. I love the fact that you can remove some of the tedium by reducing stamina drain costs, increasing carry weight, etc, so that if you want to get into the management sim aspects without the slog of a typical survival craft then you can do it easily. I would recommend this game for it's normal price, it's good fun with minor bugs and a fairly flushed out gameplay loop.

The game is a really good implementation of first-person village management. And although there is a little rpg put in the majority of people will stop playing once they have experimented with all mechanics. Only a very small minority will play enough to actually play the next dynasty (your son/daughter) or will be interested in micro-managing a village. The fun is there up to around 20 villagers and finishing the quest line. After that the interest drops hard.

Great game to easily put hours into. But somehow workers feel so useless, why does one worker get like 2 wood per day when that's not even a full tree ? lol. Same for hunters, i can have 5 hunters for 30 villagers and still need to get active myself. Also, towns feel very dead. You get some side quests sometimes, but otherwise no NPC has a personality. They all just tell you where to find bla bla. Overall I think it's a great concept and its sad where potential got lost. There should be like events in the towns, something just making the world alive. And why is there a King but no Castle you can visit? Why the only thing you can talk to with the "Landlord" is paying taxes? As in the story he knew your father or something like that.. There should be way more conversations available imo. Looking forward to future updates.

One of the best medieval games out there, period. Graphics, game-play, music, everything. It's impossible to get bored if you like building a village/town and managing it. But there's more to it. Survival, hunting, gathering resources, trading, quests, so much to do. Easily a few hundred hours of fun, worth every buck. Highly recommend it.

I started playing this game recently with my partner, and we are hooked. If you are a fan of games like Stardew Valley, and or Sons of the Forest then you'll enjoy this game. I love the town management, and economics of the game. The survival aspects of the game are nice, but lacking in my opinion. Where this game could use improvement is definitely in the NPC interaction and dialogue department. I can't ever really feel connected to NPCs in my town. I also feel there could be a lot more decorations, and customization options for your town. There's a good lot of them now, but I feel like basic stuff like putting furniture in your house should already be here. The last thing I'll nitpick is the lack of things to explore in the world. I've only really played the Oxbow map so maybe the classic map has more to explore, but I feel as if there is little reason to go around exploring. It may sound like I'm dragging the game, but honestly I really enjoy it and am glad I purchased it.

Would I recommend this game to other players? I don't honestly know many who would have enjoyed the experience as much as I did. I really liked this game, but I also am very interested in anything to do with medieval daily life and Medieval Dynasty has so much detail and variety that is appropriate to a medieval (eastern) European setting. I loved the variety of foods and items you could craft. Basically, I am a chore-game enjoyer. Sometimes when I game, I just want to do some mindless activity in a pretty place while getting that dopamine hit from whatever rewards the game gives me for doing that. No combat challenge, chop wood all day: yay! But I get that a lot of gamers are not like that! The game is part farming sim, part survival crafting and part city management. It doesn't do any of those as well as other games I have played but the combination is a great concept and it's a lot of fun for the first 10 years or so of the game. I am currently typing this review while waiting so I can sleep until next season and progress another year so my heir can be 18 and I can have a happy hunting accident and 100% this and move on to something else. The pacing is a little uneven. The first few years I had to increase the number of days in a season (the default is 3) just so I could get in all the questing / planting / building / villager recruiting / bandit loot seeking / log chopping / clay digging in that needs to be done to get going. By the end of the game, everything runs smoothly and I ended up dropping the number of days in each season and basically just waiting for time to pass. There's not much to spend coin on at this point other than yearly taxes and by the time your heir is a teenager you have more coin than you know what to do with. It's basically just a matter of managing keeping your villagers busy while trying not to hit the resource storage cap too hard. The building is not super varied and I think the game would benefit from more decorating options (other than drop this item and kind of drag it to where you want it to be). There are plenty of decorations but trees, plants, varied ground cover would be nice. All the houses are basically identical but you can edit in small tweaks. It would have been nice to have more and different styles and sizes of houses. Also I really wish you could do more with the houses besides plant a little nuclear family in each one. There could have been dormitory style houses, multi-generational houses, boarding tenants, and things like that. The questing is not good. Loads of 'run all the way across the map and give x person an item so they can give you an item for y person and then you run back again'. The exception were the heir quests. They were still fetch quests but you got to bring your kid along and impart some kind of lesson to him (it's always a him) during the process. If you're looking for medieval fighting or combat, this is not your game. A few scattered bandits and hunting wild animals is mostly all there is, but you can craft fancy elite medieval armor for that (and then mostly wear it while you put poop on your fields. There's even a crest that unlocks for that!). The 'dares' (challenges to unlock crests) were fun and I wish there had been more of that kind of thing to do during the last decade of watching my heir grow up. Speaking of growing, I really enjoyed how the NPCs age over time. No one has died yet in my game but I am a little worried about some of the traders I've been visiting since I got to the Valley. The animals do age out and die, and new ones are born. It's kind of cool. In addition to aging, the population of your own village changes clothing each season and even improves their own clothing as the city becomes more prosperous. Lots of color and styles and variety and it makes the game feel full. (I also really enjoyed the snippets of pop culture overheard in some of the things your villagers say -- references to Star Wars, Pokemon, Lord of the Rings, The Wickerman, Assassin's Creed, and many many more were things I caught in bits of dialogue. There are so many they don't get repeated all the time and it makes the village come alive a little.) While I was playing, the developer dropped an awesome update that lets you craft directly from your storages (in range) and it was such a huge quality of life improvement! I was impressed to see this kind of followup 3+ years after release and I hope that future updates continue to tweak this game and bring it from pretty good to great. Adding in colors and patterns for the buildings was a nice touch (and period accurate too!). I hope this review doesn't come across as too negative because I did really like the game. I'd love to play it co-op but I can't think of a single person in my gaming community who would actually enjoy the experience.

The game isn't that bad, but it's core mechanic, namely settlement management, is just barely there. It's all about micromanagement and cannot be played in any other way. Practically speaking, the micromanagement IS the core mechanic. It's entirely impossible to make the village fully self-sustained, and if anyone would claim "But I have my village self-sustained" I would ask: "for how many years?" Because in the best case, if you played this game in Excel, accurately balancing production, and your only interaction with the village would be selling final products and paying taxes, the village would still eventually starve on intermediate resource or overfill your storage with them. So you HAVE to fine tune pretty much everything again every time there's a new villager or someone raise their skill, or mood is changed, because everything will throw out your balance out of the window. And because there's no tools to regulate the local economy whatsoever, all you can do is micromanage your settlement all the time, throw villagers from one place to another, change production rate in vain hope you get it right, buy whatever you're missing, sell excesses. You're not developing your colony, you're getting more things to micro-manage and keeping it on manual life support. That's the core mechanic of the game, as interesting as that. Now, if developers would read this, few things that they absolutely have to implement: * Production limits. That's absolute must have. Imagine a landlord in real life seeing his smith making 1000th axe, while there's no sickles because all resources goes to axes, and farmers are loafing around in autumn and everyone is starving. And all the landlord could do is ask his smith nicely to produce less axes and more sickles. Just so that all resources would now go to sickle production and none to pickaxes, so now miners can't get copper and smith and farmers and miners are loafing around, and whole village is starving. What SHOULD happen is the landlord getting a biggest trunk there is and piking that smith on it and telling the next smith to make only one or two axes or sickles or pickaxes or whatever ONLY WHEN THERE'S NO LEFT. * Seasonal workers. Those farmers do nothing for the whole year except two-four days - to sew and to harvest. Yeah, there's carrot and wheat that can be sown in winter or autumn, but this still does not add up and generally you don't sew fields just to keep your farmers busy, you do it to maximize overall productivity of the village when it's necessary. You might not need that many carrots. So what should have is an option to reassign farmers to other workplaces, so they can make things during winter or summer, instead of spitting in the sky. * Overhaul of production system in general. Just do it like in literally every other colony management game. Throw out that abomination of +/- % of production and replace it with orders. So the use scenario is following: player opens the building, adds a production assignment and selects assignment completion options: "make n", "make until n", "make forever". The same with seasons, so assignments change with seasons. Or, alternatively, add seasons to assignment options, like "make until n when it's winter" * Finally, and optionally, and instead of seasonal workers, a new labor system, where buildings optionally might have specifically assigned workers, but otherwise anyone can do the job, as long as there's one. For some buildings, like smithy, job assignment might be compulsory, but for others, like farms or barns - no, as they should not require skilled labor.