I don't really like Medieval Dynasty (A game review)

Published on Wednesday, 15 March, 2023

This is something I've never done before, but since I for sure need some writing practice I decided to write up a review of a video game I've been playing recently - Medival Dynasty. In essense, it's a first person city builder game, set in medieval Europe. This review was posted on Steam, but I decided to document it here on my own website as well.

This is going to be a fairly lengthy review, focusing mainly on the negative points as I believe focusing on the negatives more than the positives helps better inform a potential buyer.

First, the good things:

The game is beautiful, one can clearly see that a lot of effort has been put into creating a stunning map with a lot of features. It really does feel like a medieval countryside.
The amount of buildings, items, cities and general types of content is good. There is a lot to do in this game.

Buuuut (brace yourselves):

The speed of progress is astoundingly slow. Building stuff takes ages, collecting takes ages. You have hundreds of meat and cabbage in storage and want to automate food production in the kitchen? Too bad, the villager that you've assigned to cook stew only makes 4-5 per day. You want to automate tool creation so you don't spend your time making axes for your lumberjacks and knifes for your hunters? Too bad, the smithy takes 3 days to make a single axe. Furthermore, technology points are earned veeeeeeery slowly. Want to build a mine? That's 4000 (or 5000, I don't remember)points to unlock. After 40 hours I'm at slightly under 2000, even though I've build one (or two) of every building and have 15 houses in my village. At this pace I'll probably be able to unlock this in 20-30 hours which is just too much of a grind.
Animals, mounts and technology costs are incredibly high. A chicken is 700 gold, even though it barely produces any eggs. A pig is 2000, even though it barely produces any manure. Every time you invest in something it just feels like you're sinking money into an endless pit. Early on I found out that I can make gold by selling stone knifes (2 stone and 10 sticks). This nets me about 3000 gold an hour. 40 hours into the game it still feels like my best source of income.
Even though the game is called 'Medieval Dynasty' having children (both you and your villagers) is a major disadvantage. The women stop working for 2 years and a villager can't start working until he's 18 years old. For comparison, after 40 hours of play, I'm at year 4 of my play-trough. People online will give you advice on rotating your villagers to different houses so they don't marry. This is just absurd and goes against the concept of the whole game.
Speaking of concepts, it feels like there should be some self-sufficiency of villagers. If a villager is thirsty he won't go to the well that's right in the middle of the village, he expects water to be handed to him. A hunter without a knife would never make a knife for himself, he would just wait around until a knife is provided to him. It feels like you're managing a dysfunctional commune, not a village. I think the game would be infinitely better if all production tools for villagers gave them an efficiency bonus above a certain baseline rather than being a complete necessity.
Quests are boring and repetitive. That doesn't seem to sound like a problem until you realise that you need to do them to increase your diplomacy so you can sell your goods at normal prices.
While I praised the game's map for being beautiful, you'll probably end up cursing yourself for not building your village as close as possible to an existing one. The limited carrying capacity combined with the distances makes the game more of a walking simulator than a town builder every time you want to buy or sell something in a town. I cannot over-state this - you will be spending a lot of time walking around. Now, maybe getting a mount will speed this up, but I'm yet to get one.
With the small carrying capacity (even with backpacks and such) building is a chore. You end up making endless runs to your resource storage for more logs, more sticks, more straw. It never ends.
While seasonality of crops and herbs is very cool as an idea and brings a lot of flavour and immersion it's not implemented well when it comes to harvesting and gathering. For example, you cannot set a field to be planted with wheat in Autumn and then with cabbage in spring. You have to manually change the types of plant every season, which is annoying. The herbalist hut acts the same - you cannot select which herbs you want gathered for each season when allocating work percentages.

Conclusion

I simply cannot recommend this game. Yes, it's fun for a while and it's not expensive, but it left a sour taste in my mouth. It's a 30-40 hour experience stretched to a possible 100+ hours of grind with no meaningful progression. In my play-trough I would have probably progressed in tech more if I didn't even bother with recruiting villagers and catering to their needs, which defeats the purpose of the entire game. I'm told that you can change the carrying capacity, the speed of levelling, the amount of stamina used and other parameters at the start of your game. That probably would help. But what kind of game requires "cheats" and fiddling with parameters to be good? A game that's not good in the first place.