[Console Games] Manor Lords Early Access Review

[𝐌𝐑-𝐀𝐇𝐌𝐄𝐃 体]

Gazing out across my lively medieval burgh in Manor Lords, I see great promise. The detailed buildings, villagers, and landscapes are always pleasant to look upon. The complex, rewarding, if not necessarily precision-balanced economy is entertaining and intuitive to interact with. And the war cries of my homegrown militia, off to bash some bandits, remind me that each bloody clash is costing someone a son or a husband. But for all its potential, Manor Lords is an extremely Early Access-feeling Early Access game at this point. Sometimes, it even seems more like a proof of concept than a finished product. There is fun to be had in this initial release of Manor Lords. The freedom to lay out bustling streets and market squares, putting villagers to work on sprawling farms and in smoky backyard workshops, is a joyful and generally well-paced experience. The road tool is a little fiddly for my liking, but laying out custom lots and snapping everything together dynamically at the corners makes it easy to craft settlements that look and feel cohesive and realistic.

One of my favorite little touches is the addition of backyard workshops, which let you move commerce into the places where people actually live. That's much more accurate to the era Manor Lords is trying to capture than having massive commercial buildings everyone works at. I get this cozy, familiar feeling when I zoom in and can see that this is where the town blacksmith lives. And just across the way, Herman and Agnes brew beer for the lively tavern down the road. Almost everything about the sound design and visual presentation is exceptional. Rainstorms patter and boom, leaving roads slick and strewn with puddles. Winter blankets everything in a sparkling frost. The animations for something as simple as getting water from a well are grounded and meticulously detailed in a way that always rewards me for zooming in.

You can run around on foot, but… not without some weirdness.

There's even a neat feature that lets you run around as a character in your own town, but… not without some weirdness. For one thing, you'll always be the same exact guy, no matter which portrait you chose for your ruler during set-up. And for another, the collision detection on buildings is clearly unfinished. An open gate might feature an impenetrable, invisible wall, whereas you can wander right through the outside of a church without a care like a sacreligious ghost. This, and several other features, to be clear, are marked as work-in-progress in the UI. And that's totally fine. Manor Lords is consistently up-front about what's finished and what isn't. I also ran into some other fun and funny visual glitches, like a horrifyingly deformed sheep that looked like it got lost on the way to a John Carpenter movie. Again, stuff like this doesn't ruin the experience, but it does remind me that we're very early in Early Access.
The main difficulty in Manor Lords comes from keeping all of your villagers supplied with food and fuel so they don't die, then providing them with amenities like clothes and beer to level up their dwellings and start producing wealth. It's a pretty decent little economic loop that offers enough friction to prevent outright snowballing, especially when you get a large po[CENSORED]tion that is dependent on crop fertility, mills, and bakeries to not starve. You can even specialize a settlement in making money and trade for most of your material needs, which is pretty neat. It can be a bit rough getting things going initially, though. As I discussed in my Six Things to Know Before You Play Guide, there are very limited ways to distribute your starting five families' labor that won't get you into big trouble. The tutorials are decent, but the UI sometimes made it difficult to find the information I wanted. For instance, you can hold Tab to see what everyone in a given building is doing. But I couldn't for the life of me find a way to view a list of all available families and what they were assigned to. This is a complex management game. I need more spreadsheets!


https://www.ign.com/articles/manor-lords-review-early-access