Medieval Dynasty Review (Fleischy)
Kind of decent if it fits your niche?
This is one of those games that's neither good nor bad, but steam has no "Neutral" rating so here we go.
Medieval Dynasty is clearly an early work in progress that combines 1st person survival with base management. In essence it is exactly what it looks like - a village base builder / grounded medieval survival and management game with a LOT of grinding, which is fitting. However, it has both upsides and downsides.
Pros:
- Chill soundtrack, even if not very varied.
- Co-op is fun with the right people.
- Good graphics.
- Single player has 2 main quest lines. They are fine, I guess.
- Generic NPC lines are voiced.
- There are some RPG elements with a skill tree.
- Ragdoll physics sort of work, leading to some funny instances.
- Enemies like wolves and bandits keep things spicy on the road.
- Wildlife is somewhat active with wolves and foxes able to hunt.
- Weather and temperature mechanics are present, even if a bit silly (you can warm yourself from an ice-cold swim by waving your torch for 5 seconds).
- Dirt level changes your appearance. Ok, this is not a real pro but it feels good.
Cons:
- The two maps are small. You can get to any town on foot within one day. There are mounts that reduce the walking grind but the maps get tiresome after a bit. The fast travel mechanic is way too expensive for the benefit.
- NPCs are barely or badly written, immersion is clearly not the focus with them. They all speak like they're in 2020s California, not a medieval central European village. Even your 2 year old child will speak like a 20 year old intellectual. In addition, almost every generic and ambient speech line is a modern pop culture reference or a pun. It's nice to see the authors try to be funny but instead of leaving easter eggs like other games, they just dumped the full omelette in your face while throwing out the rest. There is such a thing as memeing too hard.
- Aside from the main quest, there is basically no interaction with NPCs aside from the same 4 scripted lines. Every villager is essentially the same and feels more robotic than even Oblivion NPCs. Sometimes they give random quests like "bring me 10 sticks" that turns the player into a servant for lobotomized patients.
- NPCs are automatically physically present at their workplace regardless of distance to their home (except farmers). Not really a con, just an indicator for a lack of pathfinding and immersion.
- The player character can only have one child. For a game that markets itself as a dynasty game, this is not very fitting.
- Water mechanics have not been worked on it seems, since every water mass is 4 feet deep, and you can jump on water likes Jesus. Even your mount can jump on water like Jesus.
- The basic resources on the floor are way too plentiful. You can produce way more stone by taking a walk by the river than by spending three times the time mining.
- The tech trees are quite unoptimized and make little sense, where some basic items for a medieval village are hardlocked behind techs that you'd need to grind for several years for.
- You can only place one marker on the map, meaning you can't really note down points of interest.
- Mounts are braindead and stay in the same place for eternity without losing their hunger or health
- No dynamics in wildlife - animal spawns don't change with time.
- No real incentive to advance in weapon tech - you can slay anything with just tossing wooden spears and dancing by the animal's "patrol zone" border.
- No real challenges or endgame once you hit a proper production and commercial loop. There are some events that damage your buildings but that's just not immersive enough.
- Profanity filter on animal names, even in single player. Come on, I bought the game and I'm playing alone, I should be able to name my rooster what is appropriate.
- Building variety is pretty low. Every house looks the same, there are no variants. Decorations have to be unlocked with egregious amounts of money which the player won't afford until a proper commerical loop is set up.
Quality of life still has a long way to go.
- Inventory management is god awful. Every item has durability and any item differing in percentage creates a new entity for that item. Base storages of 10+ years of playing is awful to navigate through. Please make some kind of collapse function per item type. Sorting is not good enough.
- NPCs and animals get stuck in doors and furniture a lot. There's even a special speech option to tell them to move away, clearly to alleviate this, rather than having proper pathfinding.
- Can't rotate farms or orchards.
- The tech and skill trees need an overhaul. Some skills are essential, some are useless. The techs need optimization to properly reflect the player's growing village's commercial needs. One should not have to till 10 000 farm plots to be able to have sheep.
- All storages being connected through some 4th dimension is fine for gameplay purposes but defeats immersion.
- Temperature mechanics need proper calibration. Jumping into a river in winter and just chilling in it for an hour without any consequences, only to heat up instantly after waving your torch is silly.
- For god's sake make the NPCs less annoying. I feel like I'm at a reddit mod convention whenever I walk past any group of villagers or travellers.
TL;DR
- Nice grindy "survival"/base and production management game for a niche playerbase, plays like an indie game.
- Immersion, lore, depth are severely lacking.
- NPCs are hollow, no real interaction with them.
- Slightly wonky pathfinding.
- Looks good though, and I'm excited for future updates.