Medieval Dynasty (2021)

Played it for about 60 hours.

I really really loved the start of this game. I was playing almost nothing else for the first few days. I love survival/crafting games, but i always miss other characters in my villages. Building amazing cities and fortresses has less of an impact if your character is the only one running around in it. For 1 dude a simple shack would do..

In this game as your settlement expands, you can recruit other villagers to it. And you can assign them with work. Collecting wood, farming, fishing,... Great concept!

The game is just lacking a bit in terms of endgame. Once your settlement is up and running, there is litterally nothing to do with it. The last technology tier isn't even needed cause you don't unlock anything new. There are no lands to conquer, no enemies to defeat, no milestones to achieve. Once all types of buildings are built and villagers assigned to them, the game is just done.

tl;dr - A mellow survival / crafting game set in a lovely corner of medieval Europe where you peasant it up as best you can. Fun, but doesn't really go anywhere.

Medieval Dynasty is a game about being the biggest fish in a very, very small and terrible pond. Establishing your insignificance is handled in the first ten minutes very successfully: the prologue informs you that your planned life of being a dirt farmer is no longer an option now that your family's been murdered by northmen, and your only hope is to travel to your rich uncle's place and beg him for a job. You prance on over to his village only to discover that he is also dead, making you a double-orphan. Fortunately, the village elder decrees that so long as you make yourself useful, you can pretty much set yourself up wherever you want with whatever you want outside of town. And thus begins an epic tale of crafting, building, and grinding!

This is not a game for the ambitious. Gameplay amounts to wandering the world for food to keep you alive and resources to build stuff with. This includes basic tools which allow for better resource collection or construction jobs, buildings that unlock further crafting options, and houses that allow you to recruit more peasants to craft and cook and grind with you. As you complete story missions, the cap on the number of buildings you can build increases, allowing for a more impressive little shack-cluster.

Time passes, day into night and back again, and seasons change, altering what is available to you in the woods nearby. For some people, this is probably enough; you can lay out your town to your liking (although, protip, building on flat open plains gives you a LOT more leeway than hillsides), and over time you can make a happy little community and start a family, gradually unlock all the tech in the world.

Personally, I need a little more than that. Even with maxed out technology, you're still building rickety cottages, and it's not like there's terribly much room for creative village design. Hunting bigger and more dangerous game is kinda fun for a while - my first encounter with a bison was an absolute delight - but eventually you git gud with your hunting weapons and the challenge is all but gone. Leveling up unlocks some special character perks, but none of them change gameplay much, just make things more convenient.

And all of the game's quests are pretty low-stakes stuff. Here, grandpa, have an axe. Or a handful of mushrooms I find after five minutes' walk out of town. Or here, have a dozen wolf heads to prove I slew the vile beasts for you. Yes, you get a sense that you're improving your character over time, getting a bigger village over time, making "progress." But at the end of the day, this world is a dead end. At best, you grow from humble peasant to peasant chief, ruler of many humble peasants. Perhaps you do some special quests to become friends with the king, but fat chance of evolving from peasant to aristocrat.

Playing Medieval Dynasty is not a bad time. I eagerly dumped 24 hours into it so far and had a blast with it. But at some point it just lost me. Often, devs ruin a game by reaching too far and drowning in feature creep. In this case, it feels a bit like the opposite. Even so, for a fan of the genre looking to keep things low-stress and mellow and just enjoy lopping down trees to build their cozy country cottage, I could see myself giving the game a recommendation.

Also, mad props for giving your character a Stink meter. Always a fun design choice.