On screenshots, Manor Lords has long looked like a dream for construction game and medieval fans, but can the one-man project be trusted? The first playable demo shows: Yes! And how!
I”ve been waiting for this demo for exactly 850 days. That”s how long it”s been since I first published an article on Manor Lords, a building game that was completely unknown at the time because it had only just been announced. Since then, there is hardly any other strategy game I want to know more about. Even when it was announced, Manor Lords sounded like an absolute dream for all fans of the Middle Ages, city building and real-time strategy. In other words, exactly the kind of game that completely picks up Stonghold lovers like me.
More. On the screenshots and in the first trailers, Manor Lords looked like a perfect mix of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Total War and The Settlers.
I have never experienced the Middle Ages so comprehensibly in a strategy game. Only Kingdom Come was ever able to conjure up a nearly realistic illusion of this time on our monitors. At the same time, the developer promises strategic mass battles like in Total War and extensive settlement building like in Settlers. See for yourself:
Now it should slowly become clear why I waited 850 days for a playable version. I finally wanted to know if this mix could go well. Especially since Manor Lords is being developed by one person. One. Person.
But the time of waiting is over, the castle gate open. Thanks to the Steam-Next-Fest, a first demo version is available and makes at least the setup part of Manor Lords playable.
And by God: This demo is actually really, really good!
Table of Contents
There”s a lot in the demo
Actually, I”ve resolved to stop beating up on The Settlers too much. We all know what a debacle happened for that in early 2022. But in this case, the comparison just forces itself on you. For it is almost grotesque how much better Manor Lords understands what construction gamers expect from this genre.
In its Steam demo, which is as unfinished as it is incomplete, Manor Lords shows that building is – well, fun! That it entertains us to think through even small details of our settlement. That we simply rejoice when gears mesh, resources have to be tapped and dwellings created. Manor Lords is the complete antithesis of the new Settlers, where foresters are a distant fantasy, fields thrive even on scree, no one needs even a shitty loaf of white bread to survive and every map feels like it fits into the city garden of a petit bourgeois.
Manor Lords sees it all differently. Here I spend the first few minutes getting an overview of the game. And my mouth is immediately open. Because if you zoom out a little with the mouse wheel for this purpose, you reveal one of the most natural building environments I have ever seen. I scroll and scroll, and in front of me stretches a dense, ever-expanding forest. Interrupted only by rolling hills, narrow rivers and dusty roads:
Manor Lords creates the feeling of a wild, unexplored world in its first few seconds. In which, however, we soon leave a big imprint. And that”s the next point: already the building menu proves that Manor Lords extensively depicts village life and doesn”t simply rationalise away any buildings that fit into the setting.
I see at first glance that I can take care of quite a few things. In addition to industrial buildings such as a lumberjack camp, I find a mine, a place for firewood, various warehouses for materials and food. Also hunter”s lodges, leather tanners, iron smiths. I actually have all the tools I need for a coherent medieval village and each of them will be needed sooner or later. Even small details contribute to the fantasy of construction, for example a well has to stand on a water vein and cannot be built everywhere. I even have to place market stalls individually.
The screenshots show how wonderful it all looks. Mind you, these are my own – not embellished PR pictures!
What Manor Lords is already doing really well
Manor Lords in the demo is still a long way from the finished product. Therefore, a lot can still change. But already now I can hardly get away from the building game. Primarily because the visuals are really great. I have never in my life had the feeling of building such a believable village in the Middle Ages. It feels a bit like looking at one of those realistic model replicas from a castle museum – except that the figures really move here.
Motivating build-up spiral
In the beginning, Manor Lords often uses the construction standard and is oriented towards survival construction games such as Banished or, most recently, Farthest Frontier. The Hansels available at the beginning, who sit around a campfire, all have their own names and each of them would like a roof over their heads and a full stomach. But they don”t get any of that for free, they have to do it themselves. So let”s get to work!
First of all, the future villagers are assigned professions, so I build the lumberjack camp near the forest and employ the settler Friedlein as a lumberjack. He does not have to carry the logs alone, however, but uses Linhart, our only ox so far, to help him carry them. Inhabitants without work fulfil building orders or take care of tasks that I mark as secondary occupations – although the latter does not yet work properly in the demo.
In any case, the first farms are gradually emerging. Berries are gathered in the nearby forest, animals are hunted. By the way, you should keep a close eye on both, because if you hunt too many deer, you will eventually wipe out the population, and berries are untraceable in winter. In that case, I”d rather let the gatherer do something else before he sneaks off to do nothing.
At some point I won”t be able to get out of building. Manor Lords now knows how to motivate for hours on end, always keeping new milestones in front of me and before you know it, the initial campsite has grown into a lively settlement.
Dynamic buildings
So far, it sounds like a build-up theme, but Manor Lords is also adding its own touches. Since the announcement, I”ve wondered if this game really allows for such organic-looking villages or if the images for trailers and screenshots were simply posed. They weren”t. Manor Lords benefits from an amazing building system that allows buildings to be created very dynamically.
This doesn”t apply to all buildings, in the demo it”s mainly dwellings, fields and the marketplace. But that is enough to give me the feeling of a very natural settlement. Dwellings, for example, do not have a fixed size. Instead, when I create them, I set four points, some of which remain magnetically attached to certain places, such as roads. This makes it easy to mark out a completely dynamic area, which then makes up the residential area of the building. I can even create particularly large areas, whereupon several homesteads are created at once.
It is important that the houses have a garden. This is because, unlike in many other building games, the farmer”s dwellings are not just there to give families a roof over their heads. They are rather small farms that can also produce goods themselves. The farmyard of the house always adapts to the selected size. In the demo, the family living here produces carrots, eggs or goat”s milk themselves. A very cool and extremely authentic feature!
Above all, this building tool ensures that, unlike in Anno, the towns in Manor Lords do not look as if someone had designed them on a drawing board. Instead, I can try to squeeze a homestead between two buildings, arrange several houses dynamically along a riverbank or lay out a field so that it is organically bordered by a winding road. In its totality, settlements are created in this way, the likes of which you would otherwise only see on a drive through Upper Bavaria.
These cities not only look organic from above, but also at the highest zoom level. One of the coolest features even lets me walk through my city as a lord – and without exaggeration, it looks like an open-world role-playing game:
What Manor Lords is still missing
As a games journalist, you play a lot of unfinished games and often they only vaguely hint at the actual gameplay. With Manor Lords it”s different. The demo is already a lot of fun and is so entertaining that I could simply smile away numerous problems without having a guilty conscience.
I don”t want to go into too much detail about what”s wrong with the demo. Of course there are bugs, of course the game is very likely to crash at some point. The animations are also often clumsy and I don”t even want to get started on the balancing. All this was to be expected. It is much more exciting to look at what Manor Lords still basically needs to become a hit
The Finesse
Because the demo proves that there is tremendous potential here. The potential to be one of the best construction games of the coming years. At the same time, the game is currently motivating mainly thanks to the fantastic visuals and the intrinsic motivation to create something.
What Manor Lords lacks so far is game mechanical finesse. An Anno manages to motivate for hundreds of hours. Precisely because mechanics and visual value go hand in hand here. Of course I want to build a pretty city with many different buildings. But I also want to meet the increasingly complex demands of the population in order to reach the next level. And that is still missing in Manor Lords.
Although all families have needs in their houses, I only fulfil them out of good will. In the demo, leveling up a building does not bring any real advantages. And that”s because there is no military system yet.
The military system
I already mentioned that there is a piece of Total War in Manor Lords. Only it remains unclear how these battles play and whether they complement the build-up concept well. It seems at the moment that the battles are an important motivator, as the upgrading of houses plays into this – higher levels here mean better weapons for militiamen. But to really mature into the next building hit, this system needs to be balanced flawlessly.
And this is where Manor Lords can still fall flat on its face. Just think how many great building games have already failed because of their combat system. Not even Anno can do that without stumbling. Except the combat in Manor Lords still seems too integral to do without it as an option.
This is a bit scary, because especially construction fans like to feel unnecessarily constrained by battles. It remains to be seen how Manor Lords solves this. But at least it seems that war is not the only means to success. After all, I can also acquire new regions on the world map simply by gaining influence or favour. Both are values that I can generate economically.
A successful demo
But all this is future music. For now, this demo by Manor Lords is an impressive statement. Because the fact that so many construction fans are currently having tremendous fun with a really half-finished and thoroughly bugged game leaves little doubt about the quality.
It was never quite clear whether the individual developer might not be over-promising and end up with a completely inconsequential system behind the graphic splendour. But now I know that Manor Lords is on a really good path! It”s not a graphics dazzler, even if it”s the visuals that make up a lot of the appeal at the moment.
Whoever plays it (the demo is available for download on Steam) simply notices that a passionate heart beats in the chest of this title and it sweats potential from every pore.
Editor”s Verdict
For three hours I feverishly played the demo of Manor Lords – then the game crashed. Since there is no save function yet, my whole magnificent settlement was gone. I was devastated … for no less than 15 seconds. After that I immediately restarted the game, built two more settlements and now have almost ten hours on the clock.
Even now my thoughts revolve around this game. I would like to keep playing the whole time. But there is a point in the demo where it simply doesn”t go on. Either because the game crashes or because everything has simply been built and any further expansion loses its meaning. And yet it”s always fun for me to start again from the beginning. The game just looks so incredibly pretty and it”s extremely fascinating how different my village communities end up looking.
Since I discovered the third-person mode, I also occasionally walk around my town for minutes at a time. All this gives me great hope. Because I was always looking forward to Manor Lords. But I was also very sceptical about whether the developer could pull it all off. Particularly in times when publisher Playway announces pretty building games without end, you never know what”s going to be in it in the end. The fact that Manor Lords in its current state is already so motivating is an extraordinary phenomenon. Something really big is being created here!
Let”s hope that Manor Lords doesn”t fail in the end because of its battle system. After all, it”s just as ambitious as the rest of the game. When in doubt, I almost wish the developer would focus even more on the building aspect. But after playing the demo, I”m putting any doubt aside for now.
