Game: Lords and Villeins Early Access
Genre: Indie, Simulation, Strategy
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: Honestly Games | 1C Entertainment
Controller Support: No
Price: US $16.99 | UK £16.99 | EU € 16,99
Release Date: September 30th, 2021
Review code used, with many thanks to Stride PR
Lords and Villeins is a new medieval city-building strategy simulation game released on Early Access where you shape the dynasty of the ruling family.
City Building
In this lighthearted pixel art city building game, you manage peasant and noble families in a procedurally generated world. Unlike other games in this genre, you don’t look after the individual NPC’s instead you look after families as a whole.
When the game starts you get to customise your little pixel character and name them lord or lady. It is quite an extensive customisation as you can change the colour of your hair, eyes and clothing. You’re then taken through a pretty good tutorial that answers most of your questions and sets you up to run and manage a successful city.
Zoning
Since Lords and Villeins is set in a procedurally generated world you won’t know how many citizens you will have to cater for. You will be provided with farmers and foragers and you either start with plenty of people or only a few people.
You start with the basics by zoning out various areas of land, such as a fishing zone over a lake and individual zones for family homes to be built. Once you have laid out your zones you then click on each zone and assign a family to that zone. You’ll have gatherers, foresters, farmers and fishing folk who will all go about their daily duties collecting provisions and resources.
You’ll see your villagers grow, evolve and create relationships. They will also go through struggles and challenges to shape their lives and stories in interesting ways. Or if you are me and the first time playing the game you made everyone starve to death, you start again. I’m happy to report this time my citizens are all still alive.
Building is Simple
The building is simple, pick your walls from the menu and drag the mouse to build them. At the moment there isn’t a great selection of items to decorate your villagers or villeins as they’re called in-game. Hopefully, in the future, there will be updates to the game to add more furniture items.
I like the twist in the game that makes it slightly different from the normal simulation games that we see. The family profession of each of your citizens is passed between generations (they have children) and their members are tied to your service for their lifetime. Did I mention they die if not well looked after, something I know from experience!
Some Tweaks Needed
All resources that are collected in the game go into the main warehouse. With you being the lord or lady of the land it is your job to divvie out the resource to all the families in your city. It took me a little while to get the hang of the menu for the warehouse. You can grant for free, sell or even seize resources from your families. But try not to do that as they will starve to death. The warehouse is a good system and it’s a fun way to manage your resources.
There are some tweaks of the economy needed by the devs as well as some tweaks needed overall in the game. But with the clever management of your subjects lands definitely can be used by you to balance the distribution of wealth in your city.
Visuals and Controls
I really like how the game looks with its 2D pixel retro visuals and watching your little subject run around is enjoyable. The changing of the season’s in the game is well represented with lovely autumn colours and snow on the ground in winter.
The game is controlled by the keyboard and mouse and they work quite well. I did have a slight problem with reading some of the smaller details in the menu and UI, so maybe a bigger size font is needed for some of the writing in the menus.
Conclusion
Lords and Villeins is a well-made game for it being in Early Access. The developers have plans to add a lot more features to the game. Such as new zones, new classes of villeins. Marriage options and a military zone are just some of the things being added. For fans of simulation strategy games Lords and Villeins is one to check out and add to your Steam library.
Final Verdict: I Like It a Lot 
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