Our Feudal Baron Review is in progress as the game makes its way into the world of city builders on Steam.
The world of city builders is a cooperative one in the PC market. Not only do you have to compete with established titles such as Banished, but new games hitting the market such as Manor Lords. While the genre is vast, many games look to carve out their own little niche within the space.
Feudal Baron has its own twist by placing you as, well a Baron, and not a ruler or a King. You’ve been thrown out, and left to fend for yourself, but you’ll still need to make those payments to the King’s tax book. With your few loyal subjects, it’s up to you to rebuild and begin your adventure in this middle age world. Obviously, it isn’t just about building farms and logging camps to keep your people happy. You’ll need to politics your way to the top, working with your neighbouring factions to get what you need.
With politics, comes war, however, which is something else you’ll need to deal with eventually. Be it dealing with rebellion, taking down a rival, or stopping bandits from raiding your settlement – a blood tax will be paid, eventually.
Another thing that makes Fuedal Baron unique is that it’s not really going for the sandbox builder approach. Instead, you are given a campaign to tackle as you look to regain your birthright. The game also features unique scenarios, and of course, a sandbox mode. The campaign also acts as your tutorial to the world, you’ve seen it all before, but Feudalbaron has a unique take on the talking head approach.
Feudal Baron Review
The Pain Points
While I always understand that a game has mechanics, and you should learn to live with them – The early signs for me are that I’m not going to enjoy the “range” system on builders. I think for me, it’s that level of choice that the range system gives me. As shown in the screenshot above, the yellow area shows the “range” that my stockpile has, with the lines drawn by me. I don’t have an issue with a building having a flat X number range in an area around it, I just don’t want to draw lines all over my settlement to do it. Maybe it’s a me problem, and maybe it will grow on me, but for now, it’s annoying.
With the game being a 1.0 release, we doubt this changes, so we’ll have to get used to it.
Within Range
What we do like is that the game is trying something new, and the campaign focus is something we are here for. It’s still really early days in our play-through, so we’ve not sunk our teeth into it yet, but early signs are positive. The game has a nice flow, and while the grid system isn’t for everyone, it does always make sense on a smaller scale indie project.
It’s also worth noting that this is not an early-access game, this is a 1.0 release.
Feudal Baron Review Score 7/10
For us, Feudal Baron still has potential, but as we won’t be returning to this review we will summarise it thus.
On the positive, the game is fairly relaxing, and the medieval vibe is always one we enjoy. The management is fun once you get into the flow and start moving on your quest to rule.
Sadly, for now, the negatives might outweigh the positives. The pacing of the game and resource collecting are both slow, and the general balance feels off at times. Resource collecting never really improves, either. With late game almost feels slower than the early game. As with many early-access titles, repetitive gameplay is also a major issue, but we hope it can be fixed in the long term.
Overall, we’ll leave the game at a 7/10 which feels fair given the possible direction the game might end up going in.