Strategy Session: Manor Lords Early Access Review

02.05.2024 - 17:11 / mmorpg.com

It's happening again. A small indie developer comes out of nowhere and has everyone flipping their lid over some revolutionary new game, and you can buy it for half the price of a traditional AAA game. Except this time, there isn't some post-launch slow burn as super-streamer after super-streamer gets their chat cults all riled up. Nope, this go-around, medieval city builder Manor Lordsarrived at its Early Access launch with a wishlist army over three million strong, reaching 170,000+ concurrent players on Steam multiple times during launch weekend. But with many of its features still unfinished, Manor Lords may be just a flash in the pan, at least for now.

It Takes A Village

In case you aren’t one of the over one million gamers who purchased Manor Lords on its first day in Early Access — that’s just on Steam and doesn’t count the untold number who are playing through Xbox Game Pass — Manor Lords is the newest city builder to hit the market. More Banished than Cities Skyline 2, you’ll spend your time tending crops and fletching bows as you build your realm from the ground up.

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As you start anew on a fresh map, Manor Lords feels very familiar. You have a small parcel of land, a handful of settlers, and a scant amount of supplies to begin your new village. From these meager beginnings, you must eke out a humble existence, slowly growing your town one building at a time.

Resource management is the name of the game here, and the land surrounding your starting area holds all the resources you need to get started. The surrounding forests serve as your source of timber, which you'll need for buildings and fuel to survive the elements. At the same time, stone, iron ore, clay, animal herds, and berry patches all have an icon identifying where your workers can locate those resources. 

But gathering resources isn’t as simple as just marking an area on the map and sending workers to collect what you need. You must first construct a workspace for each type of resource you need. There's a Logging Camp to gather timber, the building blocks for the most essential buildings. A Sawpit can also be constructed to refine timber into planks for more advanced buildings. You’ll also need to construct a Woodcutters Lodge for a steady flow of firewood. Finally, a Forester’s Hut completes the circle of life by replanting your depleted forests.

Logging and all of your other industrial endeavors will need workers, and your base unit in Manor Lords is the family unit. Families are assigned to a building, and each member helps gather, process, and distribute their goods at a marketplace. You can freely move families from one job to another or leave them unassigned to help