Manor Lords - First Impressions and Gameplay Review

Introduction

Welcome back to another blog of "First Impressions and Gameplay Review," the show where we give you some straight-up gameplay and our first impressions of the latest games released. Hi folks, it's Zaid Ikram, and today we are having a look at the highly anticipated Manor Lords, a medieval city-building wargame that's been on my radar for quite a while. It's finally coming out, at least into Early Access. 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, because look at it! This doesn't look like a one-person game. It 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, I don't know, 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 that the time has been well spent.

Gameplay Overview

It's 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 who wish-listed the game on Steam, you might be wondering just what the hell 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. The core of the gameplay is still that city-building, though.

City Building and Management

Everything else is spice. This isn't Total War; you're not building those gigantic armies that are clashing all the time. Combat is 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 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. For one thing, it just looks 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 and buildings that are kind of basic but very authentic-looking. Most buildings in medieval times weren't exactly elaborate, let's say, but they covered all the types of structures you'd expect in a medieval town.

Early Game Experience

Authenticity is the name of the game here. You start with just a basic camp, a handful of families, and a pile of starter resources. Depending on the scenario, some of these things can vary a bit. There are only three different scenarios, though, and those 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 are a lot of options for folks who want to mess with it. I just stuck with a standard difficulty for the most part.

Resource Management and Expansion

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 are one of those early-game bottlenecks that can slow you down if you don't invest in them early. Without a tutorial, the game is a little disorienting at first, especially for somebody not accustomed to this kind of game. Building roads is free, and your facilities must connect to roads to make them easier to access and improve efficiency. Starting, 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.

Villager Management and Gameplay Loop

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 that the basic gameplay loop is 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 of easing you into the experience without constantly materializing you. It isn't perfect, unfortunately, but also obviously it's an Early Access game, and no game, even in its final finished state, is typically perfect.

Challenges and Complexity

The alert pop-ups and warnings you get sometimes get locked into the screen well past the point where you've already resolved whatever issue they're talking about. The help menu is pretty inadequate. There's no information here, so if you're starting and you're wondering how you get regional income, 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 to increase your town level, which allows you to unlock additional upgrades. It's 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.

Economic System and Progression

To upgrade the houses, you need to fulfill various requirements. To get a burgage plot to level two, 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 three, 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 that need to be brewed before it can be served.

City Layout and Development

These resource chains are common in this type of city builder, but it all feels a little more tactile here because the stuff needs to be done by a villager. The supply chain is 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. You can 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 intuitive.

Micromanagement and UI

That's how I would describe a lot of the stuff with this game. It all starts simple enough, but as the game progresses, the requirements and the supply chain 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 to collect the proper resources. At least they're pretty quick about it. If you're not sure what a villager is doing, the game gives you a clear way to see where they are, what their current action is, etc. But it would be nice for a proper logistics tab where you could drill down into this stuff. Having to hunt down 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 dealbreaker. The UI is otherwise really readable, very intuitive, dare I even say somewhat pleasant. But some quality-of-life features are missing in Manor Lords that are generally common in city-builder games at least at this point.

Combat and Military Mechanics

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 army. Soldiers need multiple pieces of equipment to function, and they all need to be built or bought for every single guy in the entire army. Just building up a single unit is expensive in and of itself, and when your boys are mustered, they're not working around town, which slows everything down.

Additional Features and Challenges

There are a lot of other little mechanics here and there that keep things interesting. You get supplies stolen by raiders unless you deal with their camps. There's a disease, so villagers can get sick if they don't have a varied diet. There are taxes and policies you set up, approval ratings that affect overall happiness, seasons, and crop growing that have 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 that 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.

Conclusion and Outlook

And then there is 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. You're not engaging in these epic clashes of armies. The largest army I've seen had about four 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. Every unit has stamina, which is depleted by marching. The lower the stamina, the lower the combat effectiveness, so it's something you try to keep a close eye on. There are 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 troops in battle because every guy you lose is going to hurt your village's 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 a pro-and-con situation 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 absolutely 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, and the upgrade tree is mostly unfinished, but that isn't all. Diplomacy is 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 are 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 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 pop-ups, 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 walk around your little bucolic town. A few days before the Early Access release, the developer put up a Steam post that is a long list of things that Manor Lords is not, and it's probably to stave off complaints because people do seem to have a bit of an overinflated idea of what the game is. 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 approachable city builder with some RTS elements, 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 are some things this game does that other games like it just don't do well, at the very least, and it does it all well.

Outro

That's all for today. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think. And as always, we thank you very much for reading this blog. I'm Zaid Ikram and we'll see you next time right here on Speed Tool.