Manor Lords Review - 171,000 Concurrent Players - Early access

what's up everybody this is carck with ACG once again it's my continuing mission to bring you reviews previews and podcasts without the sponsored BS and today I'm looking at the Early Access PC game pass and later on Xbox game pass title Manor Lords coming out on April 26th you won't see any overlong videos or there sponsors here and if you like that you can feel free to subscribe and hit the notify all Bell it helps the channel the most as well as commenting which helps get the channel noticed in the new post March YouTube Crazy algorithm so the game's initial start is a small town or Village simulator in manner Lords you start out with just a bit of resources from the general templates that you choose with a bunch of different options for enemy aggressiveness and bandits and you go out and try to build up a thriving Village but it's not all Robin Hood and rainbows and there's a bit of a reason for example in this title things are done a little bit differently and definitely in the name of simulation for example you need a login Camp to cut logs and you need people to man it but you also need people to build it and you also need firewood and a firewood cutting building to get fuel for the people to live and you may right I'll be thinking again this sounds like Carrick described building in reverse and I did because I want you to get an idea that planning in Manor Lords isn't just important it's vital and that flexibility is vital anything you may think is automated in this game probably isn't even when it appears to be planning requires paying attention to a huge number of elements that can change and I'll get to that in a moment so let's go back to the basics on these type of titles what matters most in manner Lords the one element that remains steadfast in the entire game is people people you can't build a damn Manor or be a lord if everybody is dead Manor Lords handles jobs and people in a way that's both unique and admittedly a bit frustrating at first for example when you assign people to work it's actually assigning families cuz back then Farmers probably had a kid who was you guessed it a baby farmer just kicking around wheat fields in their diapers working away at the soil so you're basically telling the entire family to change from being deer hunters even if they were all Farmers prior it can be weird and confusing and odd but don't let that drive you away because it makes sense even the smallest field probably needs a minimum number of people working on it and using families to represent that works and in that same field example replacing replanting and moving its stores back and forth are also requirements of the family that's attached a single family may end up having old Johnny working away in the field Tilly moving extra resources to supply buildings and young Wilhelm doing something else but manl Lords also handles building in a different way if Johnny Tilly and Wilhelm are trying to get enough wheat in the storehouse so everyone doesn't die starvation they of course can't build homes so that's where unassigned families are used unassigned families build new buildings and transport Timber to building sites as well as lead oxen to increase the mobility of all your supplies in a city without them nothing gets constructed which can be a bit confusing as well because you're building a great deal of the time so in a weird way unassigned families can oddly feel like the most assigned group in the entire game and having to go and unassign them and assign them again from different jobs or tell them to go build something can be a bit frustrating at first it's something I want to warn you about it works out great but as cities get larger and larger you might find yourself a little bit confused about where a farmer or a family is and that's prior to upgrading those buildings or adding in extra side Farms to homes thankfully manner Lords let you dive into buildings and assign the families but also oxen if you need them to transport Goods in some of them and one of the best parts of the game is upgrading the locations buildings adding crops to those homes as I said before and other improvements that I think you don't normally see there's an extension there that's a bit different than just a plus one building with more people in it because the game has an organic build Style no matter what you do I tried to get my Village and then small town to actually look terrible at times even if I tried to make Manor Lords and my little Hamlet looked terrible it was actually impossible it just always looked really cool like some kind of medieval painting regardless if it's during the midday Autumn days or the snowfill winters but during those sways in the seasons that's when the long days turn into the Dog Days Seasons all have their special threats even sickness crop turnaround and even the needs of the people are going to change for example in Winter the houses actually need more wood to burn which makes total sense and that can send you tracking around to move a family from Manning a stall to cutting wood because let's face it selling a wool shirt to a stranger is hard if a family seeking it is Frozen like villager icicles in a house cuz you forgot to cut down enough trees luckily some supplies regenerate like berries or you can replant forests other can be mined but run out Fields can be switched to other crops to help soil regeneration but that also means when building them in the first place you need to check to verify if that's a good spot to plant each time your city meets requirements for a Next Level you get development points for improving facets of it like building deep mines which turn finite resource of a mine into an infinite one many of these were actually not available during Early Access so be aware that when you get the game ensuring Your settlement is well equipped to face the challenges each new season brings is tile make no mistake Manor Lord's Sim elements may not be instantly recognizable as much of it isn't delivered exactly the same way as we've seen in other titles but click the people tab on a house and you may find that your house is a huge distance from someone's job site which is a reason why you might demolish it and move it because it matters travel matters building a road to make sure that things are connected and improved matters seeing an oxen go all the way around your village just to get to a work site is something that can cause you to look down and say man I really should have built that better but that's not the only simulation going on in manner Lords for instance wild animal herds they're not idiots and you can find them moving away from hunted lands during some seasons and poor Jacob fresh from about a dissenter from chugging down suspiciously poor grandwater has to hoof his crap stained pantaloons like two miles to find a single deer then traes back to a hunting Shack then at night hoof it back home through the rain hey man life back then was not easy and manl Lords tries to at least slightly make you feel that this may find you ordering buildings demolished or moved or assigning a close family reassessing where they are and where they need to move now speaking of demolishing sometimes you have to stove someone else's head in because they have the last Hillside with some apple trees or they just are being an ass and combat is where that ends up taking place you have to supply all your troops and they don't magically get anything it's not a never-ending field of disposable people no it's your villagers just the male ones the military is the group of people you're actually using so if you send off a bunch of poorly outfitted Fiel hands to get mulched when you go back home you're going to find that no one's there to plant that delicious carrot crop here's where the building and Sim elements actually feed into the RTS though for example your militia only needs what items it is that you've chosen for them as a unit but they have to go and make them from something or scavenge them your guys are going to traes into battle with very little though you can hire local militias for a huge helping of gold to fight in your town folks stead this is where some of that strategy comes forward do you make a bunch of money and just use militia for that you have to decide luckily there's always some jackass who takes money for punching someone else in the face so that means when you decide to go to battle like many things in manner Lords it's not just that one-step process in fact many steps is you need to have the raw materials for items you want to make a person to make those items that are different from any army unit types and then move to the items to grab them from their proper places and go to war for an easy example you may need flax to weave into Linens to then create bows by adding planks from another building to then build bows at the Fletcher's building combat so far has some missing elements due to being early Act access but it plays pretty lightly and so it seems to be a less fleshed out kind of system than the actual simulation of the village building however it's not incredibly difficult to guess where this is going and there's been some videos from the Creator on what their plans are with a lot of other systems in manner Lords though because this is Early Access it's a little bit lean it'll probably though be Sim heavy even if it looks like something like a zoomed in Age of Empires with weapon types generic formations lay of the land and unit makeup all feeding into the simulation of your battle let's talk about the HUD though and how it works to give you the information you need in a simulation in Manor Lords as you look around at your locations you'll see on the top right there's a bar that holds a ton of data about what resources you have with a click you can also move to see what resources are coming in seeing if there's a huge difference between the two and if that's worrisome or not can depend on past builds future plans and current use not having a huge food surplus can be less worrisome if it's right before the crops come in but to a town meeting level disaster if Winter's already here in the local deer herd decided to hoof it away because Bambi and her brothers decided being target practice for the local youths wasn't fun anymore establishing trade routes which requires purchasing the knowledge first is also vital so you can Shore up low resources here or there with some incoming trade if you have the money and as always the time everything takes time from finding a new resource and setting up a shop to go to war to planting crops and even to get people to respond to the positive or negative changes you made in your village and getting new families to move in as you build new homes I I can say this in all the games I've played manner Lords is one of the first ones where I caught myself feverishly sketching out plans for the future some of it due to the jankiness and missing elements An Early Access title provides other times it was because I felt a nervousness deep down in my stomach that somewhere my plans had a fault in them either by the time I got to an upgrade I would want to use something else or there was a missing resource I had accounted for in the different steps that I wanted to use to make my city better also while the tab button brings up generic readings for each building who's doing what and when the game's focus on families makes it a bit tougher sometimes to identify where openings are and the HUD could do with some Shoring up for some instant data that Gamers may need I would also like to see it where there was a full readout of families and what exactly they were doing in one tab I couldn't find that in the current options however even on the fastest setting it's deceptively slow so most of the choices that you end up making you can reverse while not really even pausing the game another section of the game that's going to be fleshed out later but is still here in some form as negotiation And discussing the dicey details of best friends who are worst friends in the conversation with other Lords which has you dropping sentences into boxes to respond to different greetings threats and otherwise bad responses will end up having you face off against those Lords in the RTS sections throwing your warriors or hired mercenaries against them and currently when you zoom out you can see all the territories around you and who to take over and win and that's pretty much your job here and when it comes to longevity because longevity isn't just about the endgame grind many times it can be about the enjoyment of the initial phases and how often you find yourself enamored with the play during those particular times that at some point you want to go back to it at a point in your play it will become a little bit more rope where the idea of watching your civilians build up a church may end up losing a bit of its luster and that's where Early Access comes in but there was honestly less times that I noticed I wasn't interested in just sitting back and watching my towns folk work incredibly hard to erect some building in a new territory or to feel that momentary burst to Celebration we not got the in-game notification of a successful project well done it's got a lot of longevity even though it is early when it comes to the graphics and the presentation all this really wouldn't matter if it ran poorly and it doesn't the performance was surprisingly good people picking carrots out of the ground major groups of deforestations occurring as you just Amazon rainforest all the trees building a Tavern the game really doesn't seem to have many performance issues at all other than a pause during a save game manner Lords also has settings for Windows resolution upscaling Max frame rate sharpening sh Shadows postprocessing bounce light volumetric clouds texture resolution as well as view distance quality and density for grasslands with many of those having four discrete level settings letting you adjust it as you need and no time is Manor Lords a super fast-paced game either even in the RTS section so those with lower level settings can dial it into to get 60 on Lower power system it's the art design and look and the feeling of building things up that I like so much in manner Lords a painting of medieval life of Trudy through terrible cold Winters to the back sweat heat of hot summers it's the Hamlet The Village the town and small city building where it excels firstly building is done in a flow instead of many gamees three-stop processes so pretty soon a couple of villagers are going to drag some tree corpses over to the spot you drew in and begin hammering together your home or wood shop or Sawmill bit by bit each part you put together is animated fences slowly lay out wood drugged down dirty roads to watch it be constructed is chopped up and laid out if you want you can walk around your village and a third person mode as well but he can't really do anything just walk around and get a bit closer to the dirt stained poor villagers that you've ordered around and regardless if you're in first person or third person mode doing the RTS or just sitting back and watch your village be built audio is really good music rarely has a Scenic feel to it without falling into more generic territory a series of Arrangements closer to musac in the elevator than anything particularly noteworthy I never wanted to turn it off it just played out in the background no matter what while there aren't a ton of voiceovers heing someone heglin old dirty deer carcasses in your stalls can be noticed if you zoom in and the audio samples of work being done or battle being waged is fine if not particularly noteworthy when it comes to the fun Factor Manor Lord's depth is intriguing not simply because it's trying to simulate almost everything or that the resources and the requirements to use them and then later that revolving Dora gomers you have to put in charge of making sure it all comes together isn't enjoyable and I find the comparisons to many other games that I've seen for this title actually a bit shallow in the representation the actual game it isn't distinctly different nor does it do every single thing uniquely but it does feel like a focus that's perhaps unestablished in some other titles in the medieval simulation Market but if you hear a lot of comparisons to Total War or something like that personally for me it does a disservice to what mandl Lords is actually trying to do and what its focus is because a lot of those comparisons will probably break down under any kind of real scrutiny but worse yet ultimately I think it's unrealistic expectations that are brought up in coverage and odd comparisons when this game should just be laed and celebrated for what it is and when it comes down to it that's what we're talking about is it worth getting right now is it worth getting Early Access I can tell you this PC game pass Xbox later definitely worth it early access I still think is worth it I rarely do reviews of Early Access so let's stamp this date and time exactly because it may change later but at least for right now I didn't have any bugs at all I had pretty good performance across all the systems and the simulation and what you get out of it for the cost that they're asking on either of the platforms or all three of them when it comes out later seems to be quite good and well worth getting even in Early Access peace out and enjoy the rest of your week subscribe to Pat

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Id: WUlSuLHl0rY

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2024