Manor Lords early access review - An incredible achievement

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Manor Lords allows you to zoom in and check your town from a totally different perspective

Manor Lords was on my radar for quite a while and over the last several days, I finally got the chance to play this incredibly exciting city-building strategy game. 

For an early access game, I have to say that Manor Lords is in an exception shape. I did not encounter any major bugs or game-breaking balancing issues. The amount of content that the game offers is quite satisfying too. 

You'll get to develop your village to a bustling town, establish trade routes, build your economy, draft villagers for your army or hire mercenaries to protect you from pesky bandits who'll try to steal your stock of food and materials every once in a while. 

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In Manor Lords, you start with a small number of settlers

The game offers two scenarios at the moment. The standard scenario is probably how most of us will play Manor Lords as it comes with the city building and army management for a full experience. There is a peaceful mode where manor Lords allows you to only focus on building your city, without all the hassle that comes with battling with other lords for teritory. 

For this short review, I've played the Standard scenario, building my village from the ground up to become a big sustainable town, created an army to take on various raiders and built a strong economy to support my townsfolk. 

You'll start by gathering the usual resources like wood, stone, berries and build the first basic buildings to start leveling up your village. In Manor Lords, you can't control your townsfolk directly but you can assign them on different jobs. Your army, on the other hand, is controlled directly by you akin to Total War games. 

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As seasons change in Manor Lords, your goal will be to prepare for harsh Winter

The initial goal will be to prepare for the upcoming winter by gathering enough fuel, be it firewood or charcoal, and food, which can be obtained by hunting, foraging berries or growing various crops. Given that Manor Lords is grounded in reality with slow game speed and immersive mechanics, you'll need various buildings to get to the actual end product like bread for example. 

First you'll grow crops like wheat, then you'll need a farmhouse to thresh the wheat into grain, which is converted to flour in Windmills. Flour is then taken by workers to communal ovens where bread is produced and ready to be shelved on the local market.

This is how the most of the production works in Manor Lords. Obviously, for some resources like firewood you won't need several buildings as all it takes is a Logging camp and woodcutter's lodge. But for more complex products like Ale, food clothes and weapons, you'll have to spend extra resources constructing all these buildings. 

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Manor Lords - On rare occassions, some buildings can catch fire

In the early access build, the construction and development of your town goes very smoothly to the point where you'll probably feel that playing on the harder scenario would be a smarter choice. However, while the early game can be a walk in the park, once you start building, leveling up the housing and your townsfolk start to demand more rare resources and materials, things get just a tiny bit tricky or expensive to be more precise. 

In addition, at one point, an artisan building was swallowed by fire, requiring a full repair while bandits will also regularly steal your stuff if you don't deal with them. Fuel consumption can skyrocket if you're not careful with construction and start expanding too quickly, especially during the winter when the demand is doubled. 

Luckily, you can get your hands on money in several ways. So for example, you can trash bandit camps or set up trade routes to sell the resources that you don't need. Every house you have in the town will regularly give you one gold per month too. 

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Combat in Manor Lords is pretty basic at the moment

You'll also have to be careful with wars and battles and when to engage in these given that your male townsfolk are your actual army. All of them have daily jobs so removing them from their important tasks can be fatal to your economy and ultimately town. 

This and many other similar mechanics make Manor Lords one of the most, if not the most realistic city building strategies I've ever played and certainly the most addictive one thanks to its incredible immersive concept.

When it comes to actual battles, I've found this aspect to be fairly simple but still very fun. Your army gets fatigued as they travel large distances towards the battlefield so you'll have to manage their energy by making them rest before the battle. Another key point of battles is to have a higher ground or flank your enemy as that will make their life very difficult, resulting in retreat. 

During my playthrough, battles never got massive where I could test just how important tactics are. 

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At the moment, battles are fairly simple in Manor Lords but still very fun

In the end, there is not much that I did not like in Manor Lords. Apart from some camera issues and missing icons as well as quality of life features that would make the management a bit easier, the game is in a great shape for an early access release. 

I can only imagine what Manor Lords will become with the support of hopefully millions of players who will buy this gem on Steam. Withouth a doubt, I will continue to follow Slavic Magic on this journey and play Manor Lords after every new content update to see how the game develops further. But make no mistake, even now, Manor Lords is a fantastic strategy that is well worth your money and time.