Playing Manor Lords on PC: A Comprehensive Review

This test is carried out on an early access version of the game. The rating is subject to change once version 1.0 is available.

If recently, city-builder developers prefer to opt for a concept that goes off the beaten track like The Wandering Village and its city to be built on the back of a giant creature or Townscaper, whose principle is part of the gaming trend devoid of problems, Manor Lords adopts a much more conventional structure which does not prevent it from dominating the ranking of the most anticipated titles on Steam. It was probably its stunning aesthetic that first made a few thousand players salivate while waiting for its early access to open..

The rendering is frankly beautiful, the road layouts and the freedom of placement provide a feeling of quite intense satisfaction, and then the possibility of switching to first person view to walk around – with no interaction available – in the alleys of his kingdom and admiring, as a noble, all his little rascals working tirelessly, is a real joy. So every detail is really built with credibility in mind: you can closely observe your craftsmen transporting freshly cut wood, or come across a young farmer picking up a rotting corpse on the ground a few meters from your borders. No doubt, Manor Lords promises from its first moments to be sensational.

Demanding but flexible

Manor Lords drops you with a simple resource: a wooded encampment inhabited by a handful of homeless settlers who must be exploited judiciously. In the most pragmatic way possible, it is then necessary to build the first useful foundations, such as the loggers' huts which supply the people with fuel and wood for construction. An entire society to shape from scratch with almost no means and the difficulty of keeping villagers happy before they leave, too hungry.

Your main scourge is this: Hunger, which quickly becomes very hard to calm down when even money is lacking; It is then in your best interest to create a trade route very early on to stock up on foodstuffs and sell the few berries that are still lying around at the bottom of your basket. Also, food production is extremely difficult and the natural resources of your region will soon no longer be enough, justifying the colonization of new territories, and therefore excellent replayability.. The challenge is perilous overall, especially since you can easily be tempted, from the comfort of your mansion, to impose a heavy tax on your subjects – at the risk of alienating them – in order to fill the fridge and you pay a few mercenaries who will kill the bandits who keep coming to burn your entire village.

If he is demanding, Manor Lords is not necessarily punitive : the winters are certainly harsh and leave you with a few bodies to bury in your church cemetery, but the dead are very quickly replaced by new settlers to put to work. Also note that the title offers three possible scenarios, placing emphasis on prosperity or conquest, and then has three difficulty levels. You even have the opportunity to define a certain number of values ​​yourself, such as the frequency of enemy attacks for example. The experience is therefore very flexible.

Incomplete but already generous early access

Finding the perfect balance can nevertheless be quite discouraging in the first hours, especially since the game is not really accompanied by a complete guide or tutorial yet. There is still an interesting side to this absence: If you don't have the ability to see what you need to do to correct a mistake, you can only count on time and a doubly satisfying series of trials and errors when you find the solution to your problems.

Let's also remember that this is early access, so some tabs are still empty of content. The whole part which involves the research and development of new abilities, or the dialogue with other kingdom holders is almost not exploited, which still represents a big loss of profit during your sessions. No need for that, however, to recognize all the potential that Manor Lords has to offer.

The game also suffers from some bugs, as openly reported by the developer. So, when thugs burn your kingdom, it is completely impossible to rebuild the censives where the peasants live, unlike other structures. You therefore have to destroy them and rebuild them elsewhere, which can be a bit tiring. The game is still very clever in its construction, installing wells in key locations on your map allows you to limit the damage.

A very advanced system

In this sense, Manor Lords already offers a number of very interesting things to develop. These censives that we were talking about in particular can be improved to the point of accommodating chicken coops, sheep or even workshops in their backyards to make armor for our valiant soldiers. You can transform certain homes into businesses, making your farmers real artisans, at the risk of depriving your fields of an important workforce. And the fields, let's talk about them, you will need them in abundance to compensate for the hunger of your subjects, the fallowing of land requiring you to wait until autumn to harvest your hard work. Each little system in Manor Lords is brilliantly interconnected and makes for an experience that is as complex as it is clever. Overall, the progression of the village, its construction, and all the management of the people to be carried out provide a really well-established feeling of realism which can already hold you for long hours. After around fifty hours, the game could potentially become monotonous, unless you choose to specialize some of your regions in different activities, such as alcohol, for example.

Conclusion