Manor Lords Reviews

Not right now I wouldn't. It's got so much potential but runs out of steam FAST. I played when it first launched last year, then I didn't play again until yesterday. I expected a ton of enhancements. While I am sure they did fix things and add things, it basically is the same game as it was one year ago. There's nothing crazy added. Once you get a solid food supply and fuel supply going, that's the game. That's it. You quickly run out of new stuff to build and then there really is no reason to take other territories because you're going to just build some houses and hit the same wall. Before someone goes "yeah, thats city building!" No. This runs out FAST. You very quickly will be out of things to do. Not talking 20, 30, 40 hours. I'm talking 1 or 2 hours and you've basically done it all. No castle building. No stone walls. No fortresses. No real reason for a big army. No real reason to upgrade houses except to add shops to them. It all runs dry quickly.

The game's definitely far from completed. At least half of the development skill points tree is grayed out, and there's bugs here and there. Patches and updates are infrequent. I recommend not purchasing until the game is closer to finished, if it ever is. I'll check back on the game in several months.

After almost a year since the Early Access release, the developer is still pumping out half-baked features and trying to balance them without making any progress that adds depth or replayability to the game. Even worse, some bugs that have been present since release and make the game partially unplayable (homeless bug that prevents happiness from rising above 50% so the settlement can grow) are simply not being fixed. The base of the game is not being worked on, instead Manor Lords is just being bloated with more features that add more hot air than anything else. Once you've managed to work around the annoying bugs and get around to building your settlement, the game ends as quickly as it started. It looks nice, building "cities" is generally fun - but that's about it. The combat system is not really worth mentioning, the trading system at the beginning is overpowered and in the mid-game it's absoulutely irrelevant. Conclusion: If you want to build a few small settlements that look nice and the game is on sale for 50 - 75%, then you might want to pick this up. Otherwise, there are many better alternatives that are simply more worthwhile in terms of game content (Banished, Song of Syx, etc...).

[h1] [i] Manor Lords is a fun yet unintuitive experience that is getting better bit by bit. [/i] [/h1] If I could grade on a scale, I definitely wish I could with this game. It isn't wholly bad, don't get me wrong. There are parts that I really enjoy. Some aspects of the game really lend themselves well to almost itching a 'cozy game' place in your brain, however you can also do battle if you want to. The decision is interesting, and I enjoy that they give the players that option. Other parts will clearly please any player who is a fan of grand strategy games, or namely fans of games such as [i]Crusader Kings[/i] or [i]Age of Empires[/i]. That I also appreciate, as I enjoy both of those games. So, why do I wish that I could grade on a scale? A few reasons. To start with the cons, I feel like there are too many moving parts to the game and without reading very carefully you will get lost very quickly because there are many nuanced things you have to keep track of and if you aren't reading every pop-up or every tutorial with a fine tooth comb, you will be easily lost. Granted, some people don't mind having to read everything to understand the complexities of the game, but others like me will find it unintuitive due to how many moving parts there are to keep track of. Often I found myself hunting down supplementary resources to understand the game, which I normally consider as a con -- this game being no exception. I feel like if I have to go to watch a video to understand how to get a certain resource because it is reliant on managing your oxen, there is a problem there. The game also feels unfinished although granted, it is. There is promise that more and more content will come out and make the game better and better, yet on the other hand, it is hard to recommend a game when in the back of your mind, you feel it has tons of polishing to do and there are lots of rough edges. I am intrigued to see where the game will go, and make no mistake I did enjoy it. I just don't think it is recommendable at this stage of development and I think there are a few bits and bobs missing for me to consider it complete.

Beautiful graphics, amazing foundations - that's it. I tried my best to enjoy this game and just couldn't. There is so much missing from the game, it makes it nearly unplayable. It's not even worth it on discount, in my opinion because it's not early access, it's simply unfinished. The UI is horrible, skill-tree branches unfinished, a lacking trade system, a town expansion system that makes no sense (can't use population from your other towns), instructions are lacking, the gameplay mechanics are almost purposely unclear, and to top it off, there's absolutely information, graphs, or other essential information provided regarding what you're producing and how much you're consuming to determine if you're meeting the needs of your town. How is this missing in a production management game? It's almost as if they designed the game to be purposely confusing and lacking information so they can pad your game time of mostly spending it trying to figure out how the game works or why something isn't working like you thought it would. If it actually worked and there is information to be found and discovered this would be okay. But I kept find myself thinking I'd find it or figure it out eventually, only to be later realize the feature I was expecting just didn't exist at all. A house with a home garden makes food. Cool. How much? Who knows!? It doesn't tell you, it just makes food, okay? Low on food and need more? Build a farm or garden. How big or how small? It doesn't tell you. A bigger plot makes more food and little one makes less food. Will that be enough? You just have to wait and see. Yet, you have a specific number of food you need to keep track of and you're not supposed to let get too low. See the issue? You give the player a number of how much food they have, but your game lacks a tracking system to tell them how much food they're producing. There's absolutely no UI telling you how much food you're making, how many food processing buildings you have and how much they're producing, how much your town is consuming, etc. This makes it incredibly difficult to build your town and manage resources because it's literally all just guesswork. Information like this is essential for a production/city-building game, yet doesn't exist in this production/city-building game. Exactly how are materials transported and is it working properly? You don't know! Just trust the process bro. And when that process will guarantee to break at some point or be incredibly inefficient because there's no UI to assist you in this, you'll soon find out because you'll be out of that material or your building won't build efficiently and you'll have to guess why. This game is like an unopened brand-new PlayStation box on Christmas day. You open it up, the outside looks amazing and pretty you know it's going to be good. But as you dig deeper into the box, you discover that it's not actually a PlayStation in the box, but a Temu FunStation. You play it anyways, hoping, that just maybe, it will at least be half as decent. But the more you play it the more you realize it's just all for looks and can't actually perform on anything. If the dev could actually focus cleaning up the production-chain style part of the game and add the necessary UI that's required for a production-chain style game, finishing the tech tree, tweaking the trade system, and... you know what, I won't list it all. It's basically the whole game that's unfinished - not early access, but literally unfinished. it has the potential of being an amazing game. But in my opinion, it's not even close in it's state right now.

This game is great and I love the concept but for me there is just not enouch pve in it for me right now. I was hoping for a nice city builder/colony survival game. Unfortunately right now it feels just like a city builder with little pve content. So if ur like me and your looking for a good pve challenge this game isn't yet that. I probaly chance my mind once a big combat update goes live.

This Game is a love letter to All medieval town survival games. Banished, Age of Man and Foundation are the three I can think of. Its a free form build a town and watch it grow sort of game with stunning visuals and lighting. Oh and Did I mention the Medevil total war style battles that unfold as the game progresses, they are Utterly perfect small skirmish battles. Its a brutal game however. If you don't start right you'll be dead before the third winter. So strategy and timing is everything...don't say i didnt warn you.

Great game so far, definitely needs to keep updating with content but very playable

I played the game when it came out and decided to give it another go once it'd gained more subtance. Alas, a year later, that extra substance isn't quite there yet. There are many many things this game does well, from the graphics to the gridless urbanism, but at this stage, it still mostly feels like a demo, with too many things alluded to but still not there... Judging by the progress over the first year, it might take a while to get the kind of city described in the main illustration. Gameplay-wise, It also takes forever to get anything done, so a lot of your time will be spent looking at your lone cow dragging a single log at a time out of the 8 needed from one side of the map to the other. Time acceleration ought to alleviate this but alas, doing so might get in the way of the mandatory micromanagement of every single of your individual working villagers. Get distracted and miss the critical window for harvest and sowing, and your settlement will be toast. I'm yet to find any trace of the "complex economic and social simulations" referred to in the synopsis, but I can still roleplay hide & seek with my villagers to find out where they are vs. where they ought to be. Some current game decisions also seem odd, like farming in a medieval society being apparently a 3 months a year job for a minority of the population, with hunting-gathering almost more efficient, or churches devoid of any clergy... Still, that game deserves to succeed, and I'll probably check it again in a year. In the meantime, if you're on the fence, there might be games more deserving of your time and money, like the excellent Urbek.

It is a lot of fun! I have a large library and a lot of experience from the genre and will say this one definitely scratches an itch no other game does. First of all, it is the first game I've played that features both realistic graphics and a good system for irregular buildings. At least the villagers' homes and the farm fields and roads you are allowed to shape them by yourself by setting out the four corners of the plot. Because the fences and borders align to roads and other buildings, this is the best game I've played in terms of giving you medieval villages that actually look fairly lifelike instead of some square grid suburb where the houses happen to have thatched roofs. The music is highly fitting and it definitely adds a new level of realism that you actually see the villagers using oxen to drag logs and carry planks over their shoulders when building something, and resources often have to be worked in several steps. (E.g most games would go grain -> bread in a single step, Manor Lords goes grain -> flour -> bread, and to make shoes it goes hides -> leather -> shoes, and so on). The game is still noticeably in early access, but is being actively worked on. It is always a difficult balancing act for devs to choose between launching new features to show what they have in store for players in the future, and fixing bugs and smoothing out existing systems. The game has been mostly solo developed by a guy named Greg for many years, but is getting more and more help to see this through from his publisher Hooded Horse, which has seen many of my favorite games through to the finishing line. The scope of the devs ambitions is huge though, and he may well have to scale them back in the future. It feels unfair to criticize a game in EA, but it does have some quirks you should be aware of. It is NOT an action-packed game focused around military conquest. It is more of a satisfying kind of organic development over time where you meet the needs of the village as it grows. As is, you only get a handful of development points to unlock new technologies, and each village has it's own technology tree with no shared knowledge between them. This is partially by design, as the goal is to have several cooperating villages in your barony rather than one totally self-sufficient megacity, and the resources on the map will totally change your strategy. However, it feels pretty silly that your tame sheep don't breed at all unless you unlock that technology (I am fairly certain the sheep know how to do that without having it explained to them), but the sheep aren't that expensive to buy so unlocking that technology would be a huge waste. I guess I'm stuck buying new asexual sheep when I need to expand the flock? My main contention so far is the trade system, but I expect it will be fixed. Trade prices are static and heavily slanted to your disadvantage. The export prices of pretty much everything is very low, and if you lack some crucial resource the import price is truly punishing and most of your total wealth will be spent importing that thing. Whereas in a real economy (both historic and current) it would be possible to earn money by importing a raw material and refining it into something more valuable, as Manor Lords currently works, this is impossible as even the most valuable exports sell for 6-12 gold while even the cheapest raw materials cost 10-12, e.g importing raw iron ore and exporting finished swords would land you at a considerable loss. (Protip: just reroll the map until you have one with good flax fertility because otherwise all you do is try to earn enough money to buy enough flax, of which you need loads, the harvests are very poor and the import prices are outrageous).