Manor Lords is a relaxed, slow-paced experience about creating the perfect town.

This is one of Manor Lords’ most striking features from the get-go: its deliberate slow-paced gameplay, which expertly captures the slow and steady rhythm of medieval life. Buildings take time to construct, as your villagers need to transport the necessary materials to the building’s location, and some other villagers need to go there and work on it. More complex buildings take longer to build because more material needs to be carried over and a lot more manpower is necessary to complete the task.

In this vein of keeping things slow, but steady, the construction tab might seem rather underwhelming at first, with little more than a couple dozen buildings. No not- I repeat- do not be fooled by this. You see, in Manor Lords, things work a bit differently than other games of the genre. While Anno and Frostpunk have specific buildings for each step of the production chain, Manor Lords’ buildings can serve several purposes.

This game is different. It scratches an itch I haven’t had scratched in a long time, just sitting and watching the progression of my village, the construction, the survival of my people just feels so…real.

It may sound cheesy but I can’t help but feel like a real Lord managing a real town, in a time that happened long ago. The relaxing nature and organic feel of the city building, coupled with the realism of it all makes me feel very, full. Like I can see myself putting hours into this game in this mode alone. My honest review is that this Early Access game, feels so complete despite being incomplete.

Graphics are gorgeous. Ambiance is fantastic. Music is excellent!

Overall for an early access it exceeded my expectations. I highly recommend it to all city builders.

P .S. They just announced more updates and game will be running on UE5 soon!

It's nice, but falls flat on its face in a few areas. I understand that it's an early access game, but the price tag shouldn't be set at $40 for what you're getting right now. Any in depth customization or optimization of the finer details of running your town is either buggy, obscured by a lack of details/understanding on how to navigate the game's systems, or is greyed out with a note stating we can expect said feature in a future update. There have been quite a few frustrating moments where things just don't work the way they should or how I expected them to based on the way these kinds of games typically progress. It felt to me that once I had learned how to play the game well, the game lost a lot of its replayability. There wasn't anything else left for me to explore within the game, there's a pretty straightforward way to success in a playthrough that doesn't leave too much room for variation.

If you're a fan of this genre, you'll probably think about the other games you've played that have done what this one does more successfully as you're playing it. If you're new to the genre, it might be fun, but you might also do better by introducing yourself via a more polished offering from another studio. Stranded: Alien Dawn feels pretty similar to this game to me.

I got about 20 hours of enjoyment out of this game. I'm glad I bought it on sale, because while I did enjoy it, I don't think I'll be picking it up again for awhile thanks to the issues I mentioned above. I don't feel super good leaving a negative review on an indie dev's passion project, but felt that the wall of glowing magazine reviews could use a realistic note somewhere, and again, it's a little strange how high the price tag is for what's on offer. I would love to see this game grow into a much more well rounded experience in the future.

The AI civis can go between provinces to get their jobs done and back home to manage home tasks but not go around the block a few hundred meters for the market supplies or the tavern, that houses market and tavern and church distance for Infrastructure updates is stupid idea and doesn't makes any sense that only close ones get access to it.
I mean if you say only close ones get access first because of distance why not they get supplies when they pass by between tasks and going home, ..?!?
One market + tavern per province should be enough for all citizens. It kind of kills the game experience a little and I just leave them to starve or freeze I not gonna make 10 different markets when the population gets to 100+.
Does the target is to try to simulate some kind of realism of real people back in that era or just copy some ideas of some other games were you have to have close markets in order to upgrade buildings, ..
Everything else so far seems good and I'm looking forward for more content to come onboard and get unlooked.
for now that's my review and might change in the future if things improve in that area, ..