Medieval Lords, developed by Monte Cristo, takes place in the middle ages, where you undertake missions while protecting your village, city, or, more importantly, your dungeon. If an enemy attacks your dungeon and conquers it you will lose everything. While the title and the intro video give you the impression Medieval Lords is an RTS game, you will quickly find out that this is more of a simulation-city game than anything else. You assume that you will be battling it out with enemy rivals quite regularly, but you’ll discover that ninety percent of the time will be spent building up your city to reach one of your main objectives such as population size. Thank goodness there is a fast forward button included.
In many ways it is very similar to other games in this genre. The included tutorial helps you familiarize yourself with configurations and steps to advance the game. The interface isn’t too bad: all of the building icons appear on the left side of the screen while the territory map appears on the bottom left along with some of the other configurations and information on technology, budget, etc. The major thing that bothered me in the interface was the fact that when I’d go to click an icon on the left side of the screen my view would start to shift to the left. It isn’t necessarily a major issue but after a while it gets somewhat aggravating. The building process is straightforward, even though the computer can get a bit fidgety during the placement of objects you want to build.
Gameplay
During the game you’ll spend most of your time trying to satisfy the needs of your people through building because taxes and conquering enemy territories are the only way you can make money. If your population is dissatisfied (which seems to happen often) they will rebel by not paying taxes. In order for the houses to expand (they get larger on a level system when needs are met) you have to satisfy the residents in several different ways: your populace needs to have enough food and water, feel secure and healthy, and be satisfied both with serenity and leisure activities. The weakest aspect of this game is the fact that the villagers never seem to be satisfied with expansion and development of your city and often refuse to pay taxes. If you have no money you can’t build anything, and as you run out of money (by building more to try and satisfy your people) you can easily dip into the red. Once this happens, the soldiers that you have recruited start to leave. Trying to raise the tax level only seems to worsen things because your population level will begin to decrease. Once you get in this cycle you will likely have to restart the mission that you are playing.
Graphics
The game’s graphics aren’t too bad but they remind me of a game that would have been released a couple of years ago. If you look at some of the newer games in this genre and compare the graphics of them to Medieval Lords you’ll see that there is a quite a difference. The game gives you the option of zooming in to different levels all the way down to a near-ground level which is a nice feature. The houses and buildings look pretty good but the environments and landscapes are rather plain; similar games are now adding quite a bit more detail and variety to the landscapes. Animals and people are very small so you can’t really see them too well while zoomed all the way out, but if you zoom in entirely they look pretty bad.
Sound
There’s nothing wrong with the music in Medieval Lords, it can get a little repetitive but nothing too bad. The music actually reminds me of the music from Morrowind. It is unchanging unless you are about to attack an enemy or an enemy is about to attack you; a good alert if you’re off in one corner of your territory trying to get your people to like you. No complaints here.
Replay Value
As far as replay value is concerned I doubt I’ll ever pick this game up again. The game doesn’t have any multiplayer capabilities, and, because I was so dissatisfied with the regular gameplay, I can’t see myself playing this game again anytime in the future. If a few patches came out that greatly improved upon the game I might consider playing it once more.
Overall
In the end I can’t recommend that you buy Medieval Lords. It had the potential to be an overall good game but it left me feeling frustrated and many times I found myself ranting away after quitting. The major things in need of improvement are the means by which you earn money, the levels of food consumption and production (which run low very easily), the dated graphics, and, probably the biggest thing, your people’s satisfaction. While you receive the impression that you will be battling it out with enemy rivals quite regularly, you soon come to realize that around ninety percent of the time you will just be building up your city to reach your population objective as well as other objectives.
