A demo code was provided, and many thanks to ICO.
City Tales—Medieval Era is a city-building game set in the medieval era. You control a small village, and to be successful, you need to build it up into a grand city with many citizens.
Another Medieval City Builder!
I just played a whole bunch of Foundation, both for LadiesGamers and for myself (about 130 hours worth). I had a lot of fun with Foundation, so I was excited to play another medieval city builder for another few hundred hours. Unlike Foundation, City Tales – Medieval Era has a very intense, very hand-holdy tutorial to begin the game, which is surprisingly a good thing. There are some oddities about City Tales – Medieval Era that makes it a little less intuitive than you might expect; even after hours of playing another similar game recently, I still needed a lot of help learning the ropes.
The tutorial guides you through how to place your buildings, how to automate them, and how to make districts in your town that will have amenities that all your people need, like a church, a market, entertainment, and more. There are a surprising number of buildings available, even early in the game, that you can make a massive, thriving town with. The more you build, the more people will want to move there. And the more people move there, the more you can build.
What is City Tales – Medieval Era Like to Play?
There are tons of different things to keep track of. You need to make sure your very important and very limited companions are being well-used. It’s important to keep track of which houses are being covered by which necessities and which they need to be covered by. You have to continually build newer and better buildings to collect items, upgrade materials, and make parts to upgrade or make other buildings.
It’s a lot of keep up with, but City Tales – Medieval Era does a great job of using visuals in order to keep everything easy to read and respond to. There is a lot about this game to like, and one of the main ones is the ease of play. Considering how much is going on, it’s nice to know they made it hard to miss anything important.
The Pros of City Tales – Medieval Era
City Tales – Medieval Era is pretty, detail-oriented, and it has great sound design. It’s a basic city builder with a fun medieval theme. I like how bright and cheerful the demo has been; I have a feeling that the full game is going to feature some big events that will challenge your town’s infrastructure and stability, but you don’t get much of that in the demo just yet.
If you enjoy the genre of games, City Tales has all the basics you are expecting: gathering, home building, management, upgrading, farming, managing a bunch of people, and keeping a close eye on your mats. Lucky for you, the game has an easy-to-read-at-a-glance bar at the top that breaks down all the items you have and what you are short on. It has big old icons to let you know when a building can be upgraded or when it is out of materials to work with. Overall, I was pleased with the UI, the feel of the play, and the look of the whole game.
The Cons of City Tales – Medieval Era
There were two main things I didn’t care for much with City Tales – Medieval Era. The first one is the companion system. While you have a ton of townspeople, you only have a handful of what are called companions. You need to use them to establish buildings for the first time. Once they have been with a building for a while, they will have made the building completely automated, and you can move them to a new building.
The first building you need to build is to gather wood. Once your wood-gathering hut has been around for a few minutes, the companion you have put as the wood-gatherer will have completely automated the whole thing, so the building takes in wood all on its own.
Since you have a limited number of companions, you can only keep so many new buildings up and running at the same time, waiting for a companion to come by and get the automation setup. I didn’t really like this setup; it limited my ability to build whatever I wanted wherever I wanted in a way that didn’t seem to add anything new and interesting to the gameplay. I’m not sure what the point of the companions was supposed to be, but it wasn’t a fun addition for me.
The second issue I had was the lack of control of where the townspeople would build their homes. What you do is draw a district on the ground. In each of those districts, you can build up to two common buildings or material stations. However, you didn’t get to decide where those common buildings were to be built inside the territory, how the houses would be laid out, or how many houses would be constructed in the district. It was really annoying when I would start building a new district, hoping to put a well and church inside of it, only to realize that the villagers had put homes in places that cut me off from being able to fit a church inside without tearing down some newly-built homes.
And the worst part of the system is that houses being upgraded need a random common building to be eligible for upgrade. So, two houses, right next to each other, might be upgraded to level 2, and one will need a church and a tavern while the other wants a pharmacy and something else completely different. With the range of each of the buildings, it seems impossible to get all the houses and common areas in the right place to overlap the right homes so you can upgrade everything.
Final Thoughts
There were a handful of things about City Tales – Medieval Era that I didn’t care for, but it still feels like a really solid city builder. The music is good, the sound design is good, and the look and the way you play are all great. Overall, I think City Tales – Medieval Era could be a really fun game. I look forward to seeing what this game does outside of the demo, early access, and beyond.
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