Manor Lords Early Access Review – The Road Ahead Is Bright

After my 20th hour of playing Manor Lords, three save files deep, I googled the medieval layout of my hometown, a market town in Kent, UK, and tried to recreate it.

No citybuilder I’ve ever played – and I’ve played dozens at this point – has ever made me pore over real-life maps. It’s a testament to the attention to detail that developer Greg Styczeń, also known as Slavic Magic, has put into this game—it’s an attention to detail that demands reciprocation on your behalf.

I Can’t Score This Game, But You Should Buy It

Manor Lords isn’t finished yet. I can’t give the game a proper score, and it’d be unfair to do so anyway. But you should still buy it. Not only will you be getting your hands on a beautiful medieval city-builder, complete with robust real-time battles, you’ll also be supporting a developer, and more recently, a publisher, which have shown complete transparency ahead of their launch—about player expectations, about price point, and about the future of the game.

It began with Styczeń tempering player expectations ahead of the early access launch in a Steam post that stated Manor Lords is not a Total War-killer, and you shouldn’t view it as such. It’s a city management game at heart, and as the most-liked comment in the Steam thread states, “Don’t worry, that’s what we all wanted anyway.”

This was followed up by another post. Manor Lords will not have a roadmap. Styczeń has been very transparent about the development progress so far, so we’re not expecting radio silence, but there’ll be no set updates or anything like that. It will be ready when it’s ready.

Lastly, publisher Hooded Horse posted a Discord announcement about the price point for the game, stating that they haven’t released it yet because of Steam’s regional pricing—but they ended on an excellent note that all publishers should listen to.

“Now the most important thing I’d like to stress: I don’t think people should be worried about price. As a publisher, Hooded Horse has never done AAA pricing on a game. We have no current plans to do so, no matter how popular a game is. And for Early Access release we’ve always previously done launch discounts in the range of 10-25% that last for the first couple of weeks. We’re not trying to squeeze every last dollar out of people, we won’t be putting up 5 editions with a spreadsheet needed to understand them or locking up content into Day 1 DLC or any of that crap. There’s going to be a fair price there at launch with a fair discount.”

Developer Transparency

I’ve watched the development of Manor Lords eagerly since 2020, when it was first announced. Styczeń is a regular Tweeter (X’er?), and over the past four years has shared concept art, game design quandaries, and sneak peeks behind the curtain as Manor Lords slowly took shape. After finally playing the game, all those sneak peeks and design questions won’t stop with the early access launch. Manor Lords is nowhere near finished. However, unlike other early access titles, this doesn’t fill me with dread. It makes me immeasurably excited.

By this point I’m sure you’ve watched dozens of hours of Manor Lords content on YouTube. Handing over the keys to content creators early on is always a risky move, but it has paid off massively for Slavic Magic and Hooded Horse. People love this game. Manor Lords has now hit 3 million total wishlists, smashing its previous record of 2 million within the space of a couple of weeks. If the game goes on to sell even a third of that wishlist number, Manor Lords will be a massive success.

What that means for the future of the game is still uncertain, but the early access version acts as its own roadmap in many ways—a lot of the tech tree is missing, so too are policies, the taxation building attached to your Manor is defunct, and shrines currently serve no purpose other than as a neat little cosmetic for your town square. Manor Lords ripples with potential. As my town expanded past the 1,000 citizens mark (another 15 hours of gameplay), I couldn’t help but let my mind wander to the things missing in the game—more farm animals, rivers and trade, town walls, merchants and workshops, dedicated market buildings, the list goes on and on.

Manor Lords Is Unique, A Mean Feat For A City Builder

The developer and publisher have been excellent so far, and the game is already a roaring success with content creators, but what exactly is it that makes Manor Lords so great?

Firstly, the game looks outstanding and the performance at even 500-600 citizens in your town is excellent. The game does start to slow down and deal with some pathfinding issues when your town gets very large, but Manor Lords isn’t necessarily about building the biggest town.

Manor Lords is about slowing down, just a little. It asks you to position yourself as a duke or baron or local ruler of a small, burgeoning market town. Progress should be slow. Families move in at a predetermined rate, so it doesn’t matter how many houses you build, only so many people will turn up month-by-month.

Resources are distributed between regions, and to grow a very large town you’ll need to spread out. Go and establish a farming village over there, or use this region to generate copious amounts of iron to fuel your militia.

Once you’ve got the population, you can raise quite a sizable army—they’re not on the scale of Total War, but they’re close to Mount And Blade: Bannerlord. What’s striking is that beside your personal retinue of heavily armoured troops and any mercenaries you bring in, your milita is composed of your current villagers. If they die, your town will have no one left to pull its wagons or tend its fields. War is brutal in this game, as it should be.

Zoning new buildings is a pleasure in Manor Lords – significantly better than Cities Skylines 2, somehow – and watching your citizens drag the logs over, build the foundations, and set up the support beams, is completely immersive. You can wander around your town in third-person, your great red cloak billowing behind you, and exploring the streets at a walking pace brings the whole package together. “I built this,” you think.

35:10

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