Hi folks, it's Falcon, and today we are having a look at the highly anticipated Manor Lords, a medieval city builder slash war game that's been on my radar for quite a while, but it's finally coming out, at least into early access.

But it's kind of hard to fault this game for its long development cycle.

I remember hearing about this back in 2019 when the one main developer ran a successful kickstarter campaign.

You'd never know this game was made by mostly just one guy though, cause look at it.

This doesn't look like a one person game, okay?

Looks way too good for that.

It's one of those games that almost sounded way too good to be true, but unlike something like the day before, people have been playing Manor Lords in beta for a while now.

It's a game the dev has given people access to, and you can tell from the early access release version I've been playing, and the time has been well spent.

It's definitely an early access game.

There are big chunks of Manor Lords that need to be fleshed out, but what we have here is highly impressive.

If you're not one of the 3 million or so people that wishlisted the game on Steam, you might be wondering just what the hell even this is.

Well, it's a game that's a little bit like a lot of other games, but it stands on its own.

It's a city builder, something similar to Anno or Banished, but it's got a bunch of RTS game elements where you command soldiers and battle bandits and enemy lords.

There's a strategic map, diplomacy, upgrade trees, supply chains.

It's a complex game with a lot of moving parts, and the core of the gameplay is still that city building though.

Everything else, it's spice.

This isn't Total War, you're not building those gigantic armies that are clashing literally all the time.

Combat's pretty infrequent, and the game's not like a Paradox game either.

You're not playing as the Manor Lord with a dynasty and role-playing choices to make.

It's not a full-blown medieval simulation game with, like, grand strategy elements.

It's a city builder, pure and simple.

The focus here is building a town.

That's the thing that the game excels at, too.

For one thing, it just looks absolutely fantastic.

The towns you can build in Manor Lords are easily some of the most natural-looking medieval cities I have seen in a game, with roads that bend naturally, buildings that are kind of basic but very authentic-looking, like most buildings in medieval times weren't exactly elaborate, let's say.

But they cover all the types of structures you'd expect in a medieval town, and authenticity is the name of the game here.

You start off with just a basic camp, handful of families, and a pile of starter resources, and depending on the scenario, some of these things can vary a bit.

There's only three different scenarios, though, and those basically amount to one with no combat, one with some combat, and one where you're constantly getting attacked by raiders.

There's only one map currently, but it is a big one with multiple regions that you randomly start in.

You can fine-tune each scenario's difficulty as much as you want.

There's a lot of options for folks who want to mess with it.

I just stuck with a standard difficulty for the most part.

So you start with basically nothing.

Just a pile of wood, some tools, a few loaves of bread, and a dream.

From there, you need to build houses, called Burgage Plots, and a woodcutting station.

You probably want to buy another axe, they're necessary for moving logs around, and one of those early game bottlenecks that can really slow you down if you don't invest in them early.

Without a tutorial, the game's a little disorienting at first, especially for somebody not accustomed to this kind of game.

Building roads is free, and it's important that your faculties connect to roads to make them easier to access and improve efficiency.

Starting out, you're also going to need somebody to pick berries and hunt wild game, because everybody's got to eat.

It's not like there's a BK or a Mickey D's down the road.

So yeah, assign villagers tasks by simply clicking on a building and assigning the job to somebody, and they'll most likely just do it without any issues.

One thing I have to commend the game on with the early access is the basic gameplay loop here is it's locked in.

There's a lot of stuff that is missing, and I'll get into that a little bit later, but the villagers get around and do their jobs, mostly without issue.

If there are bottlenecks, they mostly make sense, and in general, the game does a good job easing you into the experience without constantly tutorializing you.

It isn't perfect, unfortunately, but also obviously.

It's an early access game, and no game, even in its final finish state, is typically perfect.

But the alert pop-ups and warnings you get sometimes, they'll get locked into the screen well past the point where you've already resolved whatever issue they're talking about.

The help menu is actually pretty inadequate.

There's not really any information here, so you're starting out and you're wondering how you actually get regional income, and the help menu does not do anything to explain it to you.

Your main goal in the early game, though, is to get more people to move in and upgrade your Burgage Plots and increase your town level, which allows you to unlock additional upgrades, a simple and satisfying system.

And all the upgrades that are in the game have direct and obvious benefits, but most of them are locked in early access.

To upgrade the houses, you need to fulfill various requirements to get a Burgage Plot for level 2.

You need a church, as well as market stalls for food, firewood, clothes, etc.

None of these things are automatically generated.

You need villagers to get food and in turn run the market stalls.

You need someone to cut firewood.

You need another villager to turn animal hides, which your hunters collect into clothes.

To get to level 3, it's even more complex.

You need a tavern, more goods, a nicer church.

Mostly, it's not hard, but if you want to run a tavern, you'll need beer, which means barley from fields, and that needs to be brewed before it can be served.

These resource chains are common in this type of city builder, but it all feels a little more tactile here because the stuff actually needs to be done by a villager.

The supply chain is, well, it's not abstracted in the way that it is in a lot of other games.

It's just taking place on screen in, I guess, real time.

The Burgage Plots are one of the most impressive things in the game.

Instead of building them like most other RTS structures, you lay out a SimCity-like zoning district and depending on the size and shape of the zone, that's how many houses you build.

Give it more room for a backyard.

You can build attachments to each house, like a chicken coop or a family farm, up to a Fletcher and armor shop.

It's a complex system that still manages to be really intuitive, and that's how I would describe a lot of the stuff with this game.

It all starts off simple enough, but as the game progresses, the requirements and the supply chain, they get more and more complex.

At least with the early access build, I never really found it overwhelming, but it can require a certain amount of micromanaging when you're constantly assigning and unassigning villagers to different tasks in order to collect the proper resource.

At least they're pretty quick about it.

If you're not sure what a village is doing, the game gives you a clear way to see where they are, what their current action is, et cetera, but it would be nice for a proper logistics tab where you could really drill down into this stuff.

Having to hunt down for all the job buildings and manually add and subtract people to jobs does get tedious after a while, especially when your city starts to get big and you're dealing with dozens of families.

It's far from a deal breaker.

The UI is otherwise really readable, very intuitive, dare I even say somewhat pleasant, but there is some quality of life stuff that is missing in Manor Lords that are generally common features in city builder games, at least at this point.

If you want to bypass a lot of that busy work, you just use the trading post, you can trade resources for cold hard cash, and just buy the stuff you need, which is honestly a lot easier with certain things, but maybe a little too easy sometimes.

Probably the most tedious and difficult part of the supply chain is equipping your armies.

Soldiers need multiple pieces of equipment to function, and they all need to be built or bought for every single guy in the entire friggin' army.

Just building up a single unit is expensive in of itself, and when your boys are mustered, they're not working around town, which slows everything down.

There's a lot of other little mechanics here and there that keeps things interesting.

You get supplies stolen by raiders unless you deal with their camps, there's disease so villagers can get sick if they don't have a varied diet, there's taxes and policies you set up, approval ratings that affect overall happiness, seasons and crop growing that have, well, complications of their own.

Manor Lords has a lot of little things that seem like they could get confusing, but they're also gamified in a way that ensures they make a certain amount of sense.

I never feel overwhelmed, and that's impressive considering A, the game isn't done yet, and B, I mean there's just a lot of stuff in this game that if it weren't handled as well would be overwhelming.

And then there's combat.

I'm glad combat is here, I think it adds a layer of danger to the rest of the game that most city builders lack, but as the developers have made quite clear, it is not the focus of the game, not by even a long shot.

You're not engaging in these epic clashes of armies, the largest army I've seen had about 4 or so separate units, which means like 100 plus guys, but most Total War games have army counts that easily go into the thousands.

There is still some tactical depth, obviously every unit has stamina, which is depleted by marching.

The lower the stamina, the lower the combat effectiveness, so it's something you'd try to keep a close eye on.

There's also various combat stances you can order your soldiers to take, and you can command them to run as well.

The actual skirmishes look very good for a game like this though, there's a real sense of drama when you're using your own troops in battle because every guy you lose is going to have a negative effect on your village growth.

You can hire mercenaries and they are extremely useful, but you can only buy them with personal wealth collected through taxes and a few other means, and they charge you every month they're in service, so for a quick defense against raiders or invaders, they're super useful, but they could also prove to be a liability long term.

It's really pro and con weighing going on here, which I like.

Manor Lords is a game that is surprisingly easy to jump into, even lacking a proper tutorial.

The standard game is gentle enough that you could still make a few, or even in my case, quite a few mistakes and still do okay.

The game feels pretty complete in a lot of ways, but it is also, in others, an early access game.

I've mentioned a few things the game is missing already, a tutorial, a proper help section, there's only one map, the upgrade tree is mostly unfinished, but that isn't all.

Diplomacy is really bare bones at this point, the taxation system is probably going to get reworked because there's a tax house you can build, but it currently doesn't do anything.

There's placeholder images and text all over the place.

If you're looking for a complete experience, you're not going to find it with Manor Lords.

You can tell just a lot of stuff is missing, but to the game's credit, what is here is incredibly solid.

I encountered almost zero bugs, other than some messed up popups, and again, I want to reiterate that this is a game made by mostly one guy.

It's pretty elaborate, and I encountered almost no bugs.

That doesn't mean there isn't a lot that needs to be expanded on, but it's pretty damn good.

I do prefer to play a complete game, but for something like this where it's mostly a sandbox city builder, I think there's enough here that it is worth picking up.

It's only going to get better from here, and it's already an excellently designed city builder that looks great, has a nice interface, a UI that I don't hate using, and a visit mode where you can literally walk around your little bucolic little town.

A few days before the early access release, the developer put up a steam post that it's basically a long list of things that Manor Lords is not, and it's probably to save off complaints, because people do seem to have a bit of an overinflated idea of what the game actually is.

Like, if you think this game is going to be Paradox plus Total War, but bigger, you may be disappointed, but if you're like me, and you're here for a fun and complex, but still That's what you're getting, and it does it very well.

I am pretty excited about where this game goes moving forward, because there is a really good base here.

There's some stuff this game does that other games like it just don't, or don't do well, at very least, and it does it all really well.

That's all for today.

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I'm Falcon, you can follow me on Twitter at FalconTheHero, and we'll see you next time right here on Gameranx.