You start your journey as Racimir, who is desperate to escape poverty due to war and seeks refuge in an unknown valley. He is searching for his fortune uncle, but unluckily he finds out that he is dead.

 After that quick story line, you are thrown into the game and start your adventure in the middle of nowhere. After some quick explanations how the game works, you must go to the nearest village to get your first quest.

The world in which we are playing is beautifully designed and your senses to explore the world are more than tickling. The music fits, with its medieval theme, perfectly to the gameplay and is kind of relaxing. Even the NPCs are very interactive and are more than just props by having individually routines and sleep patterns.

Simulation and survival, does it fit together?

Medieval Dynasty is a simulation game with some survival aspects in it.

To answer this question, I will give you a quick resume of what exactly you have to do in the game.

You have constantly to pay attention to your thirst and your hunger. To quench your thirst, you can simply drink from any river in the game, which is quite convenient. For your hunger it is a bit more complicated. You can eat nearly whatever you find which is edible, but you can get food poisoning! You also have the ability to hunt, which provides you meat, which can easily be cooked on a fire. In the beginning it is quite difficult to know what you can eat without any issues and what not. But the more your journey goes on the easier it gets and you will figure out what is good food and what is bad ones. To get rid of your food poisoning you can harvest some herbs, but pay attention in which season you are, because in winter you will find no plants at all!

Talking about season. The game has, as also in real life, four seasons.

Each season has its own plants and mushrooms to harvest, which can be sold or used for cooking. Every season lasts three in game days.

Besides paying attention to all your personal stuff, you also have as big goal to build your own little village. To achieve that, you have to chop down trees, gather stick and stones, craft your own tools and build houses, workshops, storages and a bunch of animal farms. To achieve all this tasks, you can persuade NPCs to move to your town and you can give them specifically tasks, such as gathering resources or framing. But be warned for every NPC you hire, you need to build him/her a house. In the beginning you can only build a small house made out of sticks, wood and a roof out of straw. The more you move on in the game the better and bigger your houses can be.

In the game you also have to pay taxes to a guy named Unigost (damn this NPC). Taxes are calculated to the number of buildings you have in your village and how many villagers are living with you. That means besides paying attention to your health and building a whole new village you have to pay every spring those taxes. What a pleasure XD.

So do simulation and survival fit together?
For me clearly yes. The developers managed to balance these two aspects perfectly. You still have to watch over your thirst, hunger and health but in a manageable way, so that you are not too much focused on that and can easily build whatever you want.

Medieval Dynasty is a beautiful  designed game, but not without issues!

The game itself looks absolutely stunning and you can play it for hours, without noticing how fast time flies. But there are some big issues, which are really annoying.

Starting with our NPCs. As already mentioned, you can hire NPCs to do some work for you, but sometimes they do not really want to work or are just standing around without doing anything. A good example is the tavern, where they should cook. Which sometimes works but not really well. Another big issue is the farm, in which they should produce fertilizer or grains for instance, not working as well properly.

Furthermore, animals which you can purchase for your farm, do not need to be fed. Which is quite convenient, but then I ask myself why I can produce special food out of grains for them?!

There are some little issues here and there, which can sometimes grind your gears.

Is the game a multiplayer?

Unfortunately, it is for the moment a single-player game.

A lot of players are happy about that fact and fear that when multiplayer is added to the game it will open a Pandora box, which could destroy the gameplay.

In my opinion it depends on how the developers will construct the co-op mode. If they ad a whole new storyline to it and give the players the ability to build their own city, with a castle, defending walls, guards etc., it would be perfect to play with friends.

Indeed, if they are just adding a multiplayer option to the game as it is, it would destroy the whole experience of it.

Is Medieval Dynasty worth Buying? Even if it is only an early access!

I played the game now for more than over 75 hours and honestly, I could still play it another 70+ hours. You have continually something to do. Even in the “end game” you still can make look your village more beautiful and redesign a lot of things.

Personally, it is one the best early access releases I have ever seen. With a world, which is not too big not too small, with some nice mechanics and a huge possibility to manage your whole village.

If you do not mind the “small” issues of an early access game, then it is definitely worth buying it!