PREVIEW: Going Medieval

Rebuild civilization in the colony management sim that is Going Medieval.

Released: Steam Early Access
Type: Single-player
Genre: Simulation, Strategy
Developer: Foxy Voxel
Publisher: The Irregular Corporation
Release date: 1 Jun, 2021

Overview

Going Medieval is a colony management sim that is set in England, after the plague has decimated almost all population: it’s your task to rebuild civilization in the wilderness, providing food and shelter to your colonists and defending them by the attacks of wild animals… and bandits.

Going up

Going Medieval is a game that takes heavy inspiration from the similar Rimworld and Banished. Games where, besides managing the construction of the base/fortress/village, you also have to manage its inhabitants in all their needs. You will thus have to find a way to provide them shelter, a bed and, possibly, food. All of this in a harsh world where the wild animals and even other humans will try to attack and the resources you have so hard worked for. Unlike the previously cited games though, Going Medieval has an instantaneously recognizable feature: it’s in three dimensions.

Going Medieval allows you to build vertically, in order to create impenetrable fortresses that will keep your colonists safe.

Three dimensionality means that you can create tall walls and huge fortresses to defend your colonists. This becomes particularly necessary in the late game: during the first year, your enemies will attack with small raids, resembling more bandit groups than proper armies, but let some time pass and the various factions in the region will start organizing themselves, resulting in attacks with small armies and even siege equipment.

Every Is Fine… until It Isn’t

When not in war, the colony management can be fine-tuned in almost every aspect: sure, there are missing features that can instead be found in the already cited games, but that’s what Early Access is for. Going Medieval allows the player to manage the day of every single one of its colonists: you can practically manage the work/sleep/leisure hours of each person living in your village, plus manage the priority of the jobs each colonist will have to do. The goal is to build an optimized system that can work even if you don’t actively play for a while. This optimization is done considering that each colonist is unique: my Barbata is particularly good when it comes to managing the crops, so she will prioritize that among all pending tasks, whereas Robert is more proficient in the production of research points, so he will try to do that. Once you get your village running, it is very satisfying watching it working smoothly… until problems come.

In its current state Going Medieval doesn’t offer every single feature of more complete colony management sims, but its core is well-built and offers a good degree of customizability. Oh and yes, that is a lot of cabbage.

Problems come in different forms: one day you could have no more food and a long way to go for the next harvest, or bandits could be arriving the next day to attack your village while you have no defenses built. Being a colony management sim, Going Medieval asks you not only to manage the everyday life of every colonist, but also to intervene in time of crisis: how you manage these events will shape the future of your colony in meaningful ways: in a world where 95% of the population has fallen, even a single colonist is a hard loss. Will you give shelter to a new colonist at the cost of having to defend the village from the bandits that are hunting her?

So You Have Chosen… War

Peace cannot last forever and gameplay will shift in a completely different direction when battles are being fought: the game becomes an RTS as soon as you click the rally button on one or more villagers. The rallied colonists will pick up their weapons and you will be able to move them around as you please, defining the targets that they will have to attack. In this way, you can move archers to your walls or make your soldiers attack the trebuchet that is threatening your walls. And they will attack your walls with trebuchets. In fact, they will quickly become your worst nightmare: these overcomplicated slingshots will be able to attack your fortress from the border of the map: luckily you will have tons of ways to manage the defenses of your castle. First of all, you will be able to build walls to protect your people from the first bandit attacks: initially made of wood, you will be able to upgrade them with materials like limestone. Besides that, the game also leaves you the possibility to build traps to fortify your position even further.

Initially wood will be your go-to material for fortifications, but you will be quickly able to swap it in favor of more resistant ones.

On top of that, you can manually assign equipment pieces to your colonists, allowing you to basically give roles to them in a way that best utilizes their strength and weaknesses: pretty sure you don’t want to send a physically fragile person in the fray, so it will be better to give them a light armor and a bow! Obviously, if you really don’t care about this system (or if manually assigning the equipment would make a lot of difference), you can always use the “pick up whatever you want” command, and your colonists will pick up the first weapon that they will see.

Verdict

Going Medieval is a really interesting colony management sim that, while not groundbreaking, sets the foundations for a really great game. Now we will have to wait and see which new features will be introduced with the new updates, but the development roadmap looks promising already!

Written by
texdade
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