Rising Lords Review 6/10 "Medieval Mediocrity" ⚔️🛡️ #IndieGame #GameDev @argonwood

Life in medieval times was tough. The local lord or royal type wouldn’t think twice about forcing peasants to work for 28 hours a day in the fields, before sticking a spear in their hand and making them go and stab a peasant from a neighbouring village. All in the name of expanding the fiefdom and extending the empire of their glorious leader.

And Rising Lords lets you be that ‘benevolent’ ruler. This game has been loitering on PC for a few years, going through lengthy development stages before launching on consoles in its current form. A form honed and perfected to be a sleek mix of Risk-style battles and Civilisation-esque resource management, right? Right?

Wrong. Sadly. 

I was utterly bewitched by the launch trailer. The animated style is reminiscent of illuminated texts from medieval books (with a dash of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python cartoons) – beautiful cut out ‘paper’ characters representing workers and soldiers that move about an equally lovely map of varying terrain and towns to be defended or plundered, depending on current ownership. 

The game centres on a familiar premise of building up resources in one area, then recruiting an army to go and forcefully acquire another. And repeat. And there is nothing wrong with this as an idea. And I like that the basic numbers game (do I have more spearmen than they do?) is enhanced by cards that can be played in battle, as well as a terrain element (put archers on hills and keep horses out of swamps etc)

The game is one I should really like, it’s totally up my gaming Strasse, but is let down by offering the player a flawed and messy experience overall.

The game opens with music that I initially thought was meant to sound like a homage to retro games, but I soon realised it was just a bit rough sounding and it grated pretty quickly. Ok, so the music is turned down, fine. I’ll just plough on with the game itself. 

But the basic gameplay issues make themselves apparent from the off. What is all too common is having menus and information that pop up and overlap each other, meaning you cannot read parts of them. I manage to work around it, but again, it grates, detracts from the experience and makes engagement less immediate. In a similar vein, there are icons that you can hover over to see more detail, but not in every case, so guesswork is the order of the day. 

The first foray into the world of Rising Lords is via a tutorial, natch. And these are normally very simple affairs and can be a bit of a chore. The tutorial here though is quite a challenge. Not that the game itself is that complicated, mind you, it’s just that everything is so poorly explained and/or labelled that is takes an age to decipher the mass of data and navigate the many menus (which is naturally a bit slower on a console than on a PC). And the tutorial doesn’t feel well tested as there are gaps in the guidance that meant I was struggling to work out fairly basic elements.

Once you’ve worked out how to get your town running in a basic way, you are led into your first battle. Excellent, I thought, the main event. War. You get together an army made up of different flavours of fighter (archer, spearman, knight etc) with an allocation of each to make up your medieval ass-kicking crew.

I like that you assemble your units strategically outside a town, using terrain to your advantage and planning out your points of attack. But when it came to battle itself, I had no real idea in each skirmish whether I was going to come out on top or not. I sense that perhaps this game is one that once you’ve played it for a long time you’ll get a sense of what tactics to employ, but intuitive elements seemed to be in short supply.

I persevered and the experience does get better. Once you have played through a fair few rounds, you get an idea of what works. But even now I’m not really convinced that blind luck isn’t largely at play, especially in the resource management side, which is an area I am normally strong in and one normally liable to giving me nerdgasms. The game does look pretty and the battles are quick to set up and resolve, and I think this is a big part of what made me play for as long as I have.

But, aside from an appealing aesthetic and an (eventually) entertaining battle structure, it doesn’t do anything that well as to compete with the Civilisations and Age of Empires of this world. It already struggles with the in-built drag factor of being a game meant for a PC being played on the Xbox, but it feels like the interface exacerbates these issues.

SUMMARY

This is definitely a game to try a demo of, as there is a decent game in there, but it’s obfuscated by poor instructions and menus, making learning and mastering the game more of a chore than a joy. One for the keen warmongers/resource managers among you only.