Manor Lords: we tried the most anticipated game on Steam!

Finally the most awaited game on Steam has arrived on our computers and in a few days it will be available to everyone in an early access version. We tried Manor Lords and we can no longer tear ourselves away. Thanks to the graphics and gameplay, but above all it is thanks to Slavic Magic, another solitary developer who thought well of investing his last seven years of life in the creation of a game that didn’t exist yet.

Fertile lands

There are none like Manor Lords: it recalls Anno 1800 in some economic aspects, it winks at Total War with its real-time battles, the setting brings it closer to Ostriv and the characters travel à la The Settlers, but the sum of its parts generates a mixture that we had never experienced before.

However, the management aspect is the predominant one and damned if building and running the towns of Manor Lords isn’t a cathartic experience. First of all it is necessary to build a shed for the woodcutters, because without it you cannot move forward and you can find yourself stuck in a situation with no resources and no way out, it is the subsequent choices that are much less obvious.

Even if at the moment there is only one map, in each game the game will start us in a random region where, always randomly, the fundamental resources will also be distributed. Each resource may be more or less rich, so extending one’s territories will become necessary if one of these runs out. The different fertility of the lands will also change. Even starting in the same area, sooner or later it will happen, we will have to plan the village differently based on all these factors. When you start a new game, and when we conquer another region, the area will be colonized by five families who will set up a temporary camp made up of simple tents with the money from the treasury. This field lowers the player’s influence and will soon be replaced with real houses but it is essential for starting.

Fill the arsenals

All the men in the village can be called to arms with one click. What they bring into battle will be decided by the role you decide to give them, and by the equipment present in the city. When you create a battalion, all eligible men will go and get weapons and armor from the warehouse and bring them home, ready for use. If these are not present, they will have to make do with basic and naturally not very effective tools. To have the weapons we will either have to create them ourselves or import them from outside which is obviously the (much) more expensive choice. To create weapons we will have to set up an iron mine, build a foundry and specialize a house into a blacksmith’s workshop. When we give a specialization to a house, the family that lives there will be forever linked to the chosen profession. If we specialize a house in an apple orchard, the inhabitants will take care of the land and most likely build a food bank in the market area. When this happens, the family unit will no longer take care of the village, so it will no longer help with logistics or construct new buildings.

This is a very important element because the game puts you in front of various challenges, but the one you will always fight is the chronic lack of manpower. A problem that becomes worse when, for example, we focus heavily on agriculture, where large fields will require many hands to be plowed and sown in time. The families are all made up of three inhabitants, if one member dies this will be replaced over time by another; at the moment therefore there are no children nor is there any realistic growth of the family unit proposed. Sincerely? We don’t miss it much and the risk that it will all end in huge incest is very high, an eventuality that is however not as unrealistic as school books and Crusader Kings teach us.

Fill the barns

In this context, we must also take into consideration that to enable the specializations of a home it is necessary to respect certain standards: to raise chickens and goats it is enough to purchase the animals, but to create more elaborate craftsmanship these will have to be raised to a higher level. With in Anno, to level up a house it is necessary to offer it basic services: certain objects for sale at the market, the presence of a more or less large church and naturally from the second level onwards also a tavern. In Manor Lords the homes can reach the third level, but in the future these could increase, offering even more advanced homes.

Speaking of the tavern: to make it go you need beer, and for beer you have to grow barley which, when processed, will become malt which will then be taken to the home of the master brewer (one of the specialisations). Agriculture, as you can see, is a very important element of Manor Lords, as is right given the era and the seasons will influence the progress of the fields as well as the use of resources by the inhabitants. Some sources of supply, such as berries, will refill during the spring, while in the winter it will necessarily be necessary to use what was harvested in the previous months. You can also rely on trade, merchants will travel on foot until there are enough horses in the city, and also on the exchange of resources between our villages.

Extend power

We will be able to build a village in each of the regions that make up the game map, but some things will change depending on the mode you choose. At the moment Manor Lords offers three different ways to play: Rise to prosperity simply challenges us to reach the rank of Big City and then move on to endless mode, then there is the Restoring the peace mode where to win we will have to conquer all the regions, finally there is the On the Edge mode where we will have to reach maximum status by resisting constant enemy attacks. Our favorite turned out to be the second mode which allows you to have both a good dose of pressure from the enemies and a lot of time available to build many different population centers ensuring that they support each other. Enemies can be bandits who will occasionally steal from our resources, at least until they are eliminated, and our peers with whom we can also establish diplomatic relations.

These opponents will have their troops, they can be fought, but they will not be physically present with their cities on the map. This is both a good thing, because in the end we are the ones who have to build, and a bad thing, because we see that the mechanics are currently under construction. The battles are fun, the soldiers pile up too easily, but it is possible to issue several orders that we would not have expected to see in a game that focuses on other things anyway. Just one example: we liked being able to choose whether in combat our troops should try to advance, or retreat strategically. In addition to our men, to defend the villages or attack any threats it is also possible to pay mercenariesbut be careful: if you don’t provide them with the pre-established offering, they could flee at the most critical moments.

True early access

There is still a lot to say about Manor Lords, but above all there is still a lot of work to do to define it as truly complete. We don’t know if the version we have will be the one you’ll find on Steam on April 26th, but if so, expect it a game that another six months of development wouldn’t have hurt. It’s still early access, so we’re not complaining about it, but although Manor Lords is surprisingly stable and full of mechanics, several functions still don’t have an official name and appear in the interface with their command string, many of the citizen upgrades are “coming soon”, trading is shaky, diplomacy is half-baked and certain things are not explained well at all; Furthermore, it is not yet possible to build real castlesthere is no cavalry or other advanced troops.

This doesn’t take anything away from the beauty of the game, a a construction system that we could even define as innovative and capable of giving each village a touch of impeccable realism. All you need are two houses and a hut plus a road that curves up the hill and gets lost in the woods, to be fascinated by the beauty of the scene hanging as if in front of a fireplace, or an elaborate aquarium. Even the combat animations are incredibly detailed, far beyond expectations. This rigorous graphic style goes wonderfully well with this gameplay that is still under construction, but already perfectly framed to contain the exponential growth to which Manor Lords is practically condemned. This game is a bit like Stardew Valley and No Man’s Sky and has a shocking charm, as well as representing the quintessence of what millions of gamers have been dreaming of for a long time, the The Settlers that they didn’t have the balls to give us, the Total Wars as opposed to what we would have expected from Creative Assembly (to which we hear that someone proposed something similar in the past, but the idea was soon discarded). The potential is therefore enormous, as is the pressure on what we remember as a team made up essentially of just one person (graphics and music are outsourced).

Manor Lords has without a doubt met, and in some cases exceeded, our high expectations. The game has a basic form, and it is possible to guess in which directions it wants and can move but the result in these cases is never obvious. Faced with the beauty of its graphics we consequently find many question marks, many of which we hope will be answered with the release on Steam which, remember, will take place on April 26th in the early access version.