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.
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 population 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!
The other thing that can go very wrong early on is getting wrecked by bandits before you have the resources to build a full militia unit. And it seems like there's really no recovering from this. On one save file, two of the bandits just stuck around and kept burning things forever, even after several minutes on the fastest game speed, so I couldn't rebuild, but I also never got a game over. So much for that run, I guess.
When I did get a proper army assembled, though, I really enjoyed the core of the RTS combat. It's sort of Total War lite, with formations of about 20 to 40 guys who can be spearmen, axemen, pikemen, or archers. Each of these must be equipped individually with weapons, shields, and armor you either have to make or trade for yourself, which ties the economic and warfare systems together nicely. Eventually, by building a manor, an elite cadre of men-at-arms can be recruited who are fully customizable, and can equip even better gear.
Issuing orders is a breeze, and there are a number of different commands from “charge forward” to “give ground” that cut down on the amount of micromanagement required in battle. The issue is, I hardly ever needed to make much use of these systems in the current build. Your ultimate adversary, that nasty baron across the way, was never able to put together an army that could compete with one even a fair-sized town of my own could muster. Random bandits become almost a joke to deal with once you have at least two full regiments. I didn't even find myself taking enough casualties to affect my economy much in the late game. Outgrowing the greatest possible military challenges seems far too easy, and left me simply waiting around to generate enough Influence to claim more of my rival's lands. A system for the King's Favor, which can speed this up, doesn't seem to really be implemented yet.
Oh, and that manor I mentioned earlier? It's also quite a bare-bones and clunky system at this point. (Though, again, the UI will warn you of this.) There's a tax office that simply doesn't do anything. You can build walls and towers, but everything enclosed by them becomes considered part of the "blueprint" of the manor itself, which stops you from building anything else in that area ever again. So you can theoretically wall off your whole settlement, but gods forbid you ever need to move, demolish, or rebuild anything in that area. I'd honestly recommend just plopping the basic manor building and the garrison to max out your retinue size… then don't worry about it until later patches make it actually usable.
There's also only one map right now, which is a bit of a bummer. It's huge, and gorgeous, featuring several regions to start your settlement in. But I look forward to seeing more varied geography in the final version. Also, not letting me pick my starting tile is pretty annoying, and often led to me restarting over and over until I was randomly placed in the one I wanted.
