It’s been a while since my last little review here, and I hope everyone is doing well! It’s been a strange couple of weeks over here, and I’ve been battling an annoying summer cold that makes it very annoying to get work done. That hasn’t stopped me playing new games of course, and I’m covering the incredibly ambitious citybuilder Noble Legacy today.
I love ambitious games, even when they stumble more than others. Still, I will happily take that over the safe AAA games anyday, the ones that feel like they have come out of a printer. Games like Kenshi, Heart of the Machine, The Alters, and Chromosome Evil 2 get me more excited these days.
Noble Legacy interested me months ago with its blend of 3rd person RPG, village life simulation, and citybuilding mechanics, and while it has a lot of rough edges, I can’t help but admire it. It’s important to note this is very early access, and a lot is up in the air about this game for now. I’d recommend holding off on it until we see more updates that improve the polish and early game.
I tried the demo and was a bit underwhelmed, to the point where I was pretty concerned with how the launch would go. I had major technical problems like black screens, crashes to the desktop and some nasty stuttering, but the performance has improved in the launch version. The closest game to this I’d say is Medieval Dynasty, which I gradually warmed to after a rough start.
Things kick off with a little cutscene when you and your annoying fellow noble friend arrive at a rather sad looking village that has seen better days and the gameplay loop reveals itself early. The visuals are quite nice although there is quite a lot of pop in with the terrain and environments, and the character animations have a tendency to bug out a little.
All this added to the charm for me along with the voice acting, but the ambition seeps through everything here. You slowly build up the infrastructure of the village, seeing to your new servants/minions/smallfolk, and manage them. It’s decent enough with the guts of a classic survival building game, and despite all the rough edges, there’s enough gameplay to keep me engaged. The quests are the basic fetch quest affair but fortunately you can micromanage your little group of peasants for grunt work, which helps mitigate some of the grind.
Despite the jank, there is a fair bit of content with this Early Access build, something that came as a surprise. Often with this genre, launch content is very thin with only a base toolset of the game’s mechanics and very little actual content. While Noble Legacy’s story mode is limited, the game also contains a free-build/sandbox mode to mess about with as an alternate game mode, which is nice to see.
There’s a lot to like with Noble Legacy. While there is a lot of challenge with the survival mechanics, this is on the calmer end of the difficulty spectrum. The sandbox gameplay has plenty of room for experimentation, and I’m a big fan of the atmosphere. So far, there’s been a lot of patches to the game that’ve improved performance and some of the rougher bugs, but there’s still a lot of jank. Despite the rough edges with Noble Legacy, it’s one of the more interesting games I’ve played this year. For 25$, you can do a lot worse.
