Lords and Villeins

Review

Lords and Villeins is a brand new City builder/colony sim that is trying to carve out a unique identity for itself by trying out some new formulas and gameplay.

When I first heard about this new game called Lords and Villeins, a city builder where you are not only building up and managing cities, but literally managing each family, I became very interested.

When I started the game, I was very happy to see that it’s all there, the entire promised feature set. As I dug more into the game, I found it was a bit more complicated and confusing than I was expecting!

Tutorials: The game comes with a tutorial section, which doesn’t do the game justice since there’s so much to do. I believe every sim game should have a proper tutorial section where the game walks you through each important feature set.  This one does a decent job at describing the feature set, but doesn’t do a good job at following up or walking the player through the feature set.

Gameplay: So, in most city builder Sims you get to manage a bunch of people, but in most cases, you don’t get to interact with one or more individuals!

In Lords and Villeins' case, you not only to get interact with each individual, but you also get to set up a whole family and build your city/colony in a much more intimate way. You’re mainly working with family units and use them as a piece of a puzzle to put together your vision of a sim city.

Lord and Villeins does require a little bit of getting used to since you’re playing from a top-down perspective with limited zoom and UI scaling. So if you have eyesight issues I like I do, well tough luck.

City Building: To get started all you need to do is clear up/reserve a plot of land for each family to work on, and assign a task to that specific piece of plot.

For each thing that you get to build and place, you can find appropriate menus down below from eight different menu sets.

Each menu section contains information regarding what you can build and how much/which resources that might cost.

Let’s say you want to build a simple Warehouse, you’d just have to select Warehouse from the menu box, select a piece of plot, and then assign a family to that project by clicking Zone visibility and left mouse click.

In addition, from here you can interact with the assigned family, inventory, fix up the place with appropriate furniture, and more.

The process is super simple but the way the menu is laid out seems a bit too complicated for its own good.

Inventory system: Lord and Villeins features a neat little inventory system where you start with a limited yet handsome number of resources, displayed on the left side of the screen. 

Unlike most games, you cannot interact with the inventory/items, but you can donate a specific number of resources to each family whenever the need arrives.

Controls: Lords and Villeins feature a nice combo of mouse and dedicated menu buttons. To select a piece of plot, just click on individual pieces of land or left click and drag the mouse to your desired amount and left-click on it to get all the things you can do with that piece of land in a neatly organized menu box.

In addition, for the player's convenience, there’s a dedicated three-button clock accelerator to speed up things and rotate the day and night cycle.

Dedicated buttons are nice, but key binding specific functions would have been awesome. I hope that we can get that feature in a future update.

World design: Right past the character customization menu, you get to pick the land you want, and that’s about it. From here on, the way you work with the land you selected will determine how it’s going to look in the long run.

For the most part, I like how the world looks and feels; it’s a comfy little piece of land that may look small, but there is a lot to do here.

Music and sound effects: Well, I heard something the very first time I started the game; it sounded pretty repetitive so I dialed it down, but after that, nothing.

However, sound effects are certainly in place, and they are good. I mean, surprisingly good. Clicking and selecting, background ambient sound effects such as birds, ponds, chickens, etc.

Review written by BiteMexD for Zeepond.com!

Lords and Villeins Steam Store Page