In Noble Legacy, you get to build and manage a medieval town. Right now, the game has a campaign and a sandbox mode. With a lot of stuff still not out yet, since it’s quite early into early access.
I’m starting to really enjoy these medieval town management games, having an actual character you get to walk around as. There were not an insane number of options to choose from for the character builder. I prefer it that way. There were enough options to add the overall vibe I wanted without having to spend forever trying to try and fine-tune things.
For the time being, the campaign option just has the tutorial. It was a nice little place to start to understand the basics, from placing down buildings, hiring people, and managing the town.
I’m hoping there is going to be a lot more to the campaign than what is just shown as a preview on the map. Since the later kingdom tiers are not out yet, I'd suspect that to be the case. As most of these seem to be quite low-tier. Each one shows the season, how many villagers you start with, and the buildings.
As far as the tutorial went, I felt it was more than detailed enough most of the time. Half an hour at best of playing in there, and it was time to jump into the sandbox mode. With a rather solid understanding of the basics of the game.
At the very least, they do have a guide menu with a few of the tutorials listed as text with an image. I always find such things helpful when you end up returning to a game after a break, or there was some concept you skipped too fast, though, and need a bit of a deeper dive.
The game itself first felt like one of those survival games as you start off fresh on a new map. You have to go out and chop down some trees and gather some berries. Anything you can have an NPC do later, you can also just go out and do. This is always nice when there is a shortage you want to fix or just a certain activity you enjoy doing yourself as well.
Many of the resources are gathered from nodes that regenerate slowly over time. So, you never feel like you will run out of resources on the map. Sometimes, you might just have to go on a bit of an adventure once you have started to farm out your local area a bit with a couple of NPCs.
In terms of building, you tend to have two options. The game has a couple of prefabricated buildings set up that you can put down. You can also choose to build your own, however you might like.
Even better yet. Once you are done building something, there is an option to save the layout, including objects inside it. You can even choose to build the building without any objects inside if you wish.
There is even an option to upload the layouts of buildings to Steam. I could see quite a few people having lots of fun creating insane looking buildings and having others use their blueprint.
Everything you build also has a structure and decor store. Buildings can only be upgraded when they meet certain requirements, from special items being in the building to having a high enough building score in the first place.
There are also certain objects that you end up placing into a building that make it one type or another. Allowing quite a lot of freedom in the way you end up constructing something. However, at the end of the day, something like a church still needs an altar and pews in it.
The biggest issue for the time being is trying to upgrade tiles. Once you move from using wood to bricks. Sometimes you can just place down the new tile, and there are no issues. Most times, however, that's not an option, or the old tile is still showing over the new one. Requiring that annoying having to tear down buildings piece by piece as you place the upgraded version down.
Once you have something built, you just need to assign villagers to work in the building. There is also a page that shows what requirements are needed to upgrade the building to the next tier. So far, it seems a higher tier just means more worker slots.
The overall UI management for that is quite simple and easy to use. You can also just set and forget once everything is good to go. No need to worry about the fishery running out of fish and having to build another one elsewhere. Over time, there will simply be more fish back in the little lake on the map.
You can even set up a building to do some research. When I felt like not enough progress was being made, I ended up putting in a second research station and helping. With this game still being in early access, there is quite a lot of coming soon in terms of this part of the game.
At least for the time being, anything that I could research did not take that long. That, at least for now, is the overall feeling of the game. You can make a lot of progress in a couple of hours. Even more so once you understand what you are doing and how to manage the town for quick growth.
This all brings us to hiring individuals to move into your town and do the work for you. They all have requirements from something as simple as a starting home to something more advanced, like there needing to be a tavern for them to get drunk in every night.
There is also a bit of haggling that goes on. You need to pay the workers' wages. How much or little you want to pay them comes down to how badly you want a certain worker. For the time being, offering too little and then rejecting your offer was your only chance till they show back up in a fresh recruit rotation.
I have gone with some quite low success rate bids, and to my shock, acquired the recruit into my village. I even, at times, did not have an open house for them to stay in. While their happiness and production levels went slowly down. There was at least more than enough time to get them a house built.
Each of the recruits also comes with their own traits and skills. Some end up working well with other villages that have certain traits to increase productivity for that building. While others don’t get along that it decreases it.
The biggest issue I see for the time being is just how brain-dead the NPCs are. Not only do they get stuck trying to put items into storage containers that don’t accept that item. You will sometimes find, like the one above, where I placed a building down, and my entire village ended up being trapped in it.
Thankfully, if relogging does not fix an issue. You usually just must move a building or an item out of an NPC's inventory to fix whatever issue they are having. That is not the kind of micromanaging I was expecting in a game like this. That should, however, not be hard for them to fix at some point. Along with a few other bugs, the game has.
Combat is rather lackluster currently. You can swing a sword or block with it, and that’s about it. Funny enough, I had a deer get into my storage, and an NPC gave me a quest to remove it.
I’ve also had to deal with bandits or those looking to cause trouble in my town. Anytime something gets aggressive in my town, my town folk come out in mass with weapons drawn for those that can use one. While you can build some defenses, it does not appear to be a focus of the game. These events would happen every so often.
With this recently coming out into early access, it shows. With that said, it has a lot of the basics down, and many things just need fine-tuning. Along with further content being released. Overall, it was a fun game to play for a short while. Hopefully, over time, this will evolve into a much deeper game.
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Noble Legacy.
Disclosure: A review copy of the game was received for free.
Disclosure: This content was written during early access.
