Bellwright Steam Charts & Stats

7/10 A great game but it need some work for sure. Building is very time consuming but satisfying. I takes a long time to progress but its not that bad. Not a ton of end game but the story is pretty good. Some castles and plate armor would be great!

Fantastic game! I love industrious games like Satisfactory on the one hand, but also partially autonomous citizens, veeeery roughly in direction of Settlers or even Dwarf Fortress. This game is a nice combination of both worlds and gives you the opportunity to take part as a character in the middle of all that. It may be early access and of course it lacks especially story-heavy missions/quests/plot lines so far but I don't care - I enjoy the landscapes, the detailed animals, the slow building of your village (especially the later buildings would drive you crazy building manually -> you need to delegate). I mean, there are some annoying details - for me the worst is that I just can't place fences properly... or anything for that matter. Buildings seem to require a lot more room when construction is ongoing but that prevents you from placing multiple constructions nicely next to one another and it's quite a guessing game how the final building might eventually look like when done or whether there might be enough space for pathways between... But enough complaining. Overall it's awesome and has enormous potential - I really hope the development continues. The realistic middle ages vibes are impressive and that sucks me in faaaaar to easily.

Cons: Needs more content, and challenges, and let us build a proper defensive wall Pros: Gameplay loop grind is fun (not for everyone) Lets you play the way you want. AI automation isn't bad. Medieval setting is fun. Combat is good enough. MODDING SUPPORT. CO-OP

I don't like leaving reviews before I put in a good number of hours into a game, and ideally I'll come back and add to this review once I do, but I needed to say this. The optimisation. Is. Absolute dogwater. [b] If you have the minimum requirements for this game, I don't think you can run this game. If you have the recommended requirements, I think you'll be lucky to have a smooth experience running it on low [/b]. My specs are way above the recommended here, yet running the game on medium settings was giving me constant 20 FPS. What the hell? Your game is pretty, but it's not [i] that [/i] pretty. I understand it's early access, but if a player can't play your game, you don't have a game. I don't care about what features you intend to add if I'm watching my guy walk in slow motion. Figure your shit out. Note that I was able to get smooth gameplay after I implemented a LOT of DLSS frame boost and frame generation. Still on medium settings and above recommended specs, by the way. If I need to use some Nvidia fake frame bullshit to run your game, you have issues you need to work out. Optimise your game. I nearly refunded it over this, but I am still willing to give it a chance. Unfortunately, many players with a weaker PC than mine will never get that chance, despite advertising otherwise. Work out your shit.

Still in development but already a good addictive game with many updates. Grind at will.

Worth the money. Value of a game for me is determined by $0.50/hour. I have hundreds of hours, that were enjoyable, so I got my monies worth. That said I have one gripe that is a common one. The grind. Its doubtful the devs ever stopped and asked themselves how long a single play through should be. Everything is a massive grind in this game, and it shows when the mods are 99% about reducing it.

Review from 25. of June 2025, Early Access The game concept is just my jam, you build slowly a community of AI driven companions/workers/fighters, which currently have some weird AI voices ( devs promise full Voice Acting on release ). Your village is the centerpoint of game mostly, you gather wood, ore, craft weapons, care for animals, cook, usual stuff. But you also forward this to your NPC friends, so you can explore, fullfill quests for other villages, fight bandits, and, what is the final goal, liberate the lands of oppressors. There is also fishing, animal hunting, skinning, farming... its a lovely sim. Music is interesting, giving Witcher 3 vibes. Fight system is not boring, and you can take your NPC friends with you, So you can crush bigger and bigger enemy groups, kinda "mount and blade style" but lil smaller scale. Also, this game has CO-OP ! Which seems really like it doubles/triples/quadruples the fun, depends how many friends you can gather. BUT i played 100 hours so far, SOLO, and still, it was a ride. This review is written several days after last patch, year after Early Access started, and it was worth the money. But still i hope i get MORE value for my hard earned EURO´s, i hope devs finish this amazing game, so i can play it again on full release ! :) Have fun guys !!! And make peace not war... So far 8/10

It's not bad, this is a very borderline recommendation. In it's current form I'd give it a 6/10. If you're on the fence I'd stay on it for now until the game is further along into development. The good - It feels great starting off alone and building up a town, recruiting, training and equipping followers and then saving the nearby towns. It's rewarding earning renown and then spending it on new recruits. I also liked researching new technologies and then equipping myself and my people with new gear. The meh - In some areas it is very, very rough around the edges. Building is a pain, especially once you hit tier 2, moving buildings and resources is a big headache. Transferring resources to a new town is an enormous chore. Moving your units long distances is also a massive headache to the degree I often just ran around on my own. Bandit spawning mechanics feel very rushed and sloppy. They just magically spawn in units and buildings, they ought to need resources and time just like the player. Combat is janky, one vs one is fine, but as soon as you are up against multiple opponents the combat falls apart. Melee units don't attack at a sensible range for their weapon, they'll sprint towards you like feral zombies (even if wearing full plate armour) until they are literally nose to nose like they want to give you a big hug. The bad (very bad) Squad/Army management is abysmal. It's an absolute nightmare to control your units and unless you arrange them into formations manually they will get slaughtered by the enemy (even your toughest max stats warriors). The last straw for me on this playthrough was I ordered my archers to refill their ammo from an arrow basket (they inexplicably don't do this without you telling them to) and they all ran to a nearby warehouse and got undressed. I wish I was joking. On the subject of archers: enemy archers, even the most basic ones wearing rag trousers and nothing else, are all as overpowered as Legolas as they will headshot you consistently from extreme range through trees, shrubs and sometimes even rocks. Any attempt to zig zag or sprint sideways is futile as they'll still hit you with unerring accuracy. Whereas somehow your own archers are useless, they will plink away all your expensive ammo and hit nothing but terrain. More than that though your units always feel very underpowered regardless of their stats. Left alone they will always lose to raider parties. It made me feel like I had to tuck them all away somewhere safe rather than actually bring them into combat.

The first half of the game (up to the middle of tier 2 out of 3) is awesome, but it seems the game has been properly developed only up to this point. After that the gameplay stops evolving, instead of getting anything new you just get much more of the same. If you ever get tired of massacring bandits and brigands - you get tired of the game, since that's all there is up to the end. You will just get more bandits and brigands in thicker armor. Every camp clearing is the same, every town liberation is the same, you will only get more enemies with better equipment, the process itself is the same. Every task in this game is tedious by design, but generally it's not a problem, since you are supposed to automate thing with your villagers, and they do a decent job harvesting and processing resources as you order. This part of the game is done well enough. However, the few tasks which demand player's attention, like building outposts and leading your army far away from your main settlement, quickly become a chore. Both are required by the middle of the game, and both remain the same until the end. Leading the army far away takes half an hour in one direction, so you have to build a specific fast-travel building, river port, in a few spots on the map where it is possible, which is tedious just like outposts and takes about an hour per port. And even then, your soldiers on march are infuriatingly slow, even walking them from port to camp and back will get old soon enough. Half of the playtime is spent running around on foot, as fast-travel is severely limited here. You can travel alone, without your army, between travel signs you build. They are cheap and unlimited, but can only be built at pre-existing roads and far enough from villages. The last limitation is severe, as doing quests will require you going from village to village countless times, which means teleporting to the closest sign and then running uphill on foot for half a minute to the village itself. You can't build fast-travel points inside a village even after liberating it, so you are stuck running uphill and hopping fences every time you decide to visit a village, which you will do a lot. The game is still in early access, so maybe they will make the later half of the game more meaningful in the future if they don't abandon it, but right now there is essentially only half a game done, with a few tens of hours of monotonous camp clearing, army walking and sprint running on top.

I don’t usually quit games once I’ve sunk a few hours in, but Bellwright just burned me out. On paper, it has everything I like: medieval setting, base-building, survival mechanics—but in practice, it’s just an exhausting loop of chopping wood, hauling rocks, and micromanaging villagers who barely seem to function. The grind isn’t just slow...it’s lifeless. You spend so much time doing the same handful of tasks, and there’s barely any payoff. No major sense of progress, no real narrative push, and no “oh wow” moment that makes the effort feel worth it. I kept waiting for it to click, but it never did. To be fair, it’s not broken. It runs fine. Some people will enjoy the slow-burn, systems-heavy game play. But for me, it felt like I was working a second job, with worse pay.