Manor Lords

The divide comes down to one thing.

The scoring gap around Manor Lords comes down to a single fact: it is a half-built game. Critics have it at around 71 on OpenCritic, in the "Fair" tier, with only a little over 40% recommending it; players, meanwhile, have given it an 84% positive rating across more than 73,000 Steam reviews. One camp judges it by the standards of a finished product and sees a pile of gaps; the other sees it as a promising work in progress and focuses on the dazzle and the potential.

Both takes are right; they just ask different questions. Critics ask, "Is it complete now?" Players ask, "Can it become something?" Grasp that, and you see why this review is generous on building and art yet unsparing on content and combat — it is a game whose strengths and gaps are both razor-sharp. Its hardest-to-copy strength is the way towns grow organically along the roads you lay out, each one feeling unique, combined with a near-obsessive recreation of a specific medieval era — something you will scarcely find anywhere else. It is not the most feature-rich builder, nor the most polished, and it does not pretend to be; what it has instead is a voice entirely its own, and in a genre full of competent grids, a voice is rarer than completeness.

Should you buy in right now

When it comes to deciding, the key is to be clear about what you want from a city-builder. If you enjoy laying out road networks, weathering hard winters, and managing a town from chaos into order, and the fine medieval art moves you, then Manor Lords already offers joy that is hard to find elsewhere — even unfinished, its endlessly replayable opening earns its price. It is often on sale too, and not expensive for an indie game. And because each update adds more to it, buying in now is one of those rare cases where getting more value later costs you nothing but a little patience. For players who already love the genre, the question is less "is it finished?" and more "is what is here now good enough to be worth my time?" On that count, the answer is an easy yes — finished game or not, its opening hours are some of the best the city-builder genre has produced in years. You are paying early-access money for a slice that already outclasses plenty of complete releases.

Now, or wait

But if you want fully developed mid- and late-game goals, hardcore tactical battles, or simply dislike playing unfinished games and would rather wait until it is all done, the more rational move is to hold off for a while. Its most direct rival, Anno 1800, easily surpasses it in terms of overall system depth and completeness — but that is a mature builder built on a prefab grid, while Manor Lords was never aiming to be the "most complete" game right now. Instead, it is betting on becoming the most distinctive later, carving its own path with organically grown villages and a strong sense of immersion.

In the end, the only question you have to ask yourself is this: do you want a finished city-builder right now, or are you willing to follow a hugely talented developer as he builds something destined to be special, one brick at a time? Answer that, and the score on this page will make sense to you — to the patient builder, this is a piece of raw jade worth holding on to; to the impatient player, it is still an unfinished game with no clear end point. Almost all of it comes down to whether you are willing to pay for potential.