A small indie game promises base building, tactical role-playing and survival in the dark Middle Ages. Plus a nasty plague that turns people into zombies. In the demo, we face a catastrophe.
Do you remember when there were no more demos and you couldn’t return games on Steam? When you practically had to buy a pig in a poke, especially for smaller titles that didn’t get immediate press coverage?
Times have changed since then, because in addition to the two-hour refund on Steam, demos have also experienced a revival. Unfortunately, the developers are overdoing it a little in the other direction. As is well known, many games in Early Access are still very unfinished, even if you know halfway what you’re getting yourself into.
Plague Lords has a rather unusual problem, but one that goes in a similar direction. Its demo has the total plague. What I mean exactly and whether the indie title, which mixes turn-based tactics, a bit of building strategy and survival, is worth a closer look!
Table of Contents
With the sword against the plague
In a nutshell, Plague Lords is about freeing medieval northern Italy from the undead with one or more small fighting groups in board game style. I only know that this is Italy because the game tells me so. From a purely visual point of view, I would rather have placed it in a kind of northern European Witcher world. How and why I’m wandering around in this plague area of all places is explained to me by the game in the main quest line, whereby the story so far fits on a beer marker.
Let’s start with a group of three, who are also my main heroes relevant to the story. I was allowed to create my own character beforehand, which means choosing a name, portrait and background/role. Sergeant, Monk and Bounty Hunter differ in their five character values Strength (melee strength, carrying capacity), Agility (ranged strength, movement speed), Stamina (energy level), Wisdom (all sorts of things and number of skills) and Charisma (leader skills and number of party members).
More role-playing than building titles
If I now tell you about character classes, crafting skills, life, energy, hunger, thirst and morale, you will realise that Plague Lords is more of a tactics role-playing game with survival elements than a building game. This is because the building elements are limited to setting up a permanent encampment.
In order to give my characters a breather in which they can recover, I have to return with them to a camp every now and then. This can consist of just a few sleeping tents or it can be fully developed, with its own blacksmith’s tent, lumberjack’s camp, hospital, kitchen and fortifications to keep out the zombies that keep coming your way. Oddly enough, all the tents you erect act as movement blockers for enemies, as if they were solid walls.
Once is not once!
The rest of the time I wander around the map with two actions each turn. In the permanent day/night change of the world, I rummage through abandoned buildings, mine a few resources and loot the undead that I regularly have to slay while I pursue my quests. In the process, the map and thus the location of the individual quest stations is regenerated with each new game – for whatever reason. I know this because I have restarted the game five times. And not because I really wanted to play through the demo several times, but because Plague Lords is still hopelessly buggy.
Plague Lords is hopelessly buggy
Sometimes the game just hangs, then it becomes infinitely slow or crashes directly. Smaller difficulties are also the order of the day and night, for example when I want to camp out to refuel my exhausted crew. This costs a lot of resources (such as wood and food), which I sometimes only get by robbing empty houses. It’s a bit stupid when the game deducts the resources but then doesn’t start the camp action.
And Plague Lords is a disaster in its current state in other ways too. It starts with the annoying looting of the houses. Why do I have to press the space bar at least ten times until I’ve cleared out a house? Even in-game, the comrades take forever…what are they doing in the mill for two days? Removing the millstone?
To make matters worse, if the party are attacked by zombies while looting, the building goes into a buggy suspended state where it can’t be looted any further, but doesn’t indicate that.
Survival without Survival
And another example: When I upgrade my temporary camp into a real military camp, the rest function is suddenly missing…which at least isn’t really relevant, because at least in my playthrough it didn’t seem to make any difference if the troops have been hungry and thirsty and out of energy for days. And morale is directly deactivated for the demo.
Presumably the characters should then have less fighting power, but that wasn’t really comprehensible. Because the battles in Plague Lords play out without much tactics or influence on my part. Zombies come and attack in close combat, my characters defend themselves. It rumbles, both sides lose lives based on their stats and equipment (each character has a weapon and a breastplate). It then rumbles until one side (i.e. the zombies) is down. I can only use one volley shot from the ranged fighters per round.
The biggest factor influencing my losses is whether or not I have previously healed the characters with food. Because especially the expendable side characters that I find somewhere from time to time can’t take that much or are already wounded. Stupidly, I also never have enough food to take care of my people properly.
The core gameplay loop is not working properly
Theoretically, the game now wants me to prepare for new forays in camp by crafting new weapons and equipment and keeping my squad at high morale and health. On the tours I should then collect new loot and, above all, more survivors of the plague in order to become stronger and stronger and to progress in the main quest.
However, as far as I have been able to see, I cannot build my own city or anything like that. And the world map doesn’t have much to offer so far, apart from a few abandoned houses and farms. There wasn’t much more to see in the gameplay trailer either.
All in all, Plague Lord is one of the most disappointing games I have played in a long time. The game vision is clear to me and the art style looks interesting. But the game itself could not convince me, especially since the current version is so buggy that it is hardly playable in a reasonable way. And to take up the introduction once again: No, Plague Lords is currently not worth a closer look, not even for free.
Editor’s conclusion
I don’t know why the developers of Plague Lords released this demo. I’m usually happy about the possibility to test a game before buying it. But please not in such a state. Now I almost have to assume that this demo shows the essential game. After all, why release a demo when 80 percent of the content and mechanics are still missing or broken?
It also rarely happens, no matter what state a title is in, that I don’t enjoy it at any point. But Plague Lords actually turned out to be nothing but a grind. Looting is an annoying click, there’s nothing interesting to find and the whole survival mechanic around feeding my fighters lacks any balance so far, so it simply doesn’t work yet.
So for once I have to say: Hands off! And if you’re still interested in the game, check it out again in six months at the earliest.
