Lords and Villeins

There is an issue with this game that causes it to only use 2 of the CPU cores. In my case, I'll have 2 cores maxed and 6 idle by midgame. At midgame the game lags so hard the framerate drops to 10fps. looking at the forums, it seems the game is abandoned. I really like this game and its a shame, the Dev's have a great concept and did a good job executing. At this point in time I can't recommend this game. FYI I have over 650 hours of game play.

Unfortunately its as many people have reviewed, the game is a buggy mess and the dev has abandoned the game. I like the early game, but the bugs with middle to late game make it unplayable.

I loved this game and have been playing for years but cannot play any longer in its current state. I could have lived with the game being poorly optimized but after only 1 in game year I have run into game breaking bugs. The game is no longer being updated so I wouldn't recommend buying.

Mixed feelings on this one. I think I can see the game it WANTS to be, and I would love to play that game, but unfortunately that is not the game that actually exists. Lords and Villeins has some fun ideas bogged down by intricate yet frustrating gameplay, dependence on NPC-automation-flavor-AI, and a surprising amount of granular details that fight for dominance in the player's eye. There are over a dozen tutorial stages and even the first few can quickly get overwhelming (this may be separate from a core game design issue, it may be that whoever plotted the tutorials simply did not know how to create a good tutorial flow). On top of that, for reasons beyond my understanding, the game has an absolutely abominable loading time, so it can take several minutes to wait for the next tutorial to even load in - and it never loads in paused, so there's that (it also doesn't pause when the new tutorial element pops up in your face). There's a lot of things the game tries to stress are important to you, but you're ultimately at the mercy of the NPCs' programming [i]letting[/i] you actually accomplish that. It has potential, but is definitely clunky.

I really love what this game does. Having a little economy where every family has to stay afloat and interact with the others makes for a very nice village simultion. There are not that many games in that genre that attempt to simulate markets and small economies (Ratopia is another but very different one) It has it's issues, apparently the game grinds to a halt after a specific pop size and performance is never impressive compared to similar games like Songs of Syx. My main problem that made me bounce of multiple times at the start is the endless and boring list of tutorials at the beginning. It takes a while until you reach a point where it starts clicking together. Some UI aspects could have been less convoluted and it might have required less tutorialization. But despite that, I enjoy it.

This game felt like the Wish version of Rimworld but more chill. Fun time but a little slow and boring. Maybe it gets cooler later?