Medieval Dynasty Review: Survival in the Flesh (PS5)

Developer Render Cube, along with publisher Toplitz Productions released Medieval Dynasty a little over a year ago on Steam, to a nice and welcoming reception. the game sits right now with a coveted “Very Positive” score on Steam and a respectable 73 metacritic score at the time of writing. One year later and the game is out on console too, causing a resurgence of players and opinions on the survival title that could very well vindicate or disproof those scores.

Survival is a genre that has spun a lot of games, with all or at least most of them attempting to stand out from the rest, be it through its theme, mechanics, difficulty or innovation. Most of these titles tend to blend together in a mesh of similar mechanics and gameplay with varying degrees of success and popularity. The idea of facing off against the elements and the odds while managing your resources and town may just never get old, but it is in the execution that new games can attempt to make a mark. With some pretty great entries in the genre as of late, just how well will Medieval Dynasty fare? Let’s find out.

Medieval Dynasty is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC via Steam for $34.99 USD. It is also available on Game Pass at the moment.

Story

Yes, there is a story in Medieval Dynasty. Actually, there are technically a bunch of stories. The stories in the game accomplish two things: First, It provides a reason for you to be where you are, even if it doesn’t provide much of a motivation. And second, it serves as a vehicle that you can use to learn about the world, and, most importantly, the many, many mechanics you have at your disposal to interact with said world. 

You start walking in a dense forest, following the marker in your compass. Pretty soon you reach a small village next to a river, where you find out the person you are looking for is not available, but you are at least in the correct place. Unless you decide to interact with anyone else, the first person you would encounter and strike a conversation with would be the castellan who will give you your first set of quests, provides a bit of exposition by explaining to you that you can just take any piece of land you want to start your own town, and reminding you that you are on the hook for taxes to the king. 

You’ll very soon come to find out that it is keeping up with taxes that can be the most demanding survival mechanic in the game. Every new building in your village will increase your tax rate for next year, and those stack up. Fast.

Everyone loves paying taxes, right?

This is as far as the story -has- to go. From this moment on, you’ve unblocked the ability to start building your first rudimentary tools and buildings and you can develop the necessary skills to survive and continue improving upon your town all by yourself. Or you can keep coming back to this and other towns and do the quests they have for you. Doing so will help you level up faster and it is a decent way to tutorialize the mechanics, but the game won’t force you to follow the story. 

If you do decide to dig into the story, you will find out details about the people that live in the valley, although this is not tremendously interesting. The point of the game, story-wise is to survive beyond your original character, or to create and actual dynasty. Your character will age as time goes by and the main objective is to procure a wife and have descendants to continue on. It is a pretty neat concept.

Writing and Dialogues

This is one of the weaker points for Medieval Dynasty. The developer has designed these quests that will help you get a decent grasp on the game and its many mechanics, but the quality of the writing and the dialogues fall short to make you actually care about any of these characters. And sure, this is a survival game at its core, and you would normally not even have as many NPCs to interact with as you do in Medieval Dynasty, but having a bunch of characters and not getting them to be memorable enough that you care about them makes them feel more like filler content than an actual feature. 

The valley can be quite beautiful

There a a number of minor issues with grammar in some of the dialogues and the familiarity and jokes that characters can have to one another feels insincere at best. At some points the lines you are exchanging with the NPCs makes the whole exercise feel like an awkward play your teachers would force you to participate in back in elementary school. And now that I’m writing about that, I’m realizing that this happens on almost all dialogues.

Gameplay

Now, this is where Medieval Dynasty shines the brightest, at least if you are into hardcore survival. If you’ve ever played a top-down city-building strategy and/or resource management game, and have said something along the lines of “What is this villager doing? I could do their job so much better!”, well, this is the game to prove it.

Mixing the difficulty that comes with city building and management with a first-person survival gameplay mixes remarkably well and creates an immersive atmosphere where you may face a variety of issues, from not having enough food or water to lacking the necessary number of people to run your town in a semi-functional manner, to everything in-between. There is also a matter of luck with the random events that pop up that can influence your town’s wealth and morale, for instance.

Random events can influence your game

Medieval Dynasty does have a few short-comings, that I feel came from trying to over-reach on what the game experience was supposed to be, but in essence it accomplishes the mixing of two different genres into one slick gameplay experience for the most part. it is when on top of that it tries to add some RPG elements that it starts to feel a bit iffy, but luckily it is easy to overlook that front. 

Radial Menus for Days

There really is no way to dance around this fact: Medieval Dynasty has a lot of radial menus. And I do mean a lot. R1 to access the hand-crafting and building menu, use the D-pad to access your equipped tools and weapons, oh, and in that R1 menu? sub-menus!, and these can go deep into 3 or even 4 layers depending on what you are looking for.

The implementation of the radial menus into the console version of the game is, in my opinion, a successful one. I do find it easier to make a selection on the radial menu using the joystick than the mouse, but that may very well boil down to personal preference. It was an improvement for me. 

Clashing Gameplay Elements

You can sometimes get more than what you can handle in Medieval Dynasty, or it can at least feel like it at first when getting started. The village-building elements are solid once you get used to the radial menus and sub-menus. Combat and hunting can be somewhat jarring but it’s not terrible. The survival elements (Temperature, hunger, thirst) are a constant pressure but they are not punishing, as long as you prepare ahead of time for longer trips and whatnot. 

Hunting animals is quite satisfying

What can get in the way of immersion is sometimes the quests and side-quests. The way these are structured and presented makes it feel at times like the game wants you to treat it as an RPG, but if you do, the survival elements get in the way and you may feel like you are dropping the ball on the quest. At the same time, the survival elements are mostly explained through actually completing quests, which serve as a tutorial of sort. 

With this, you are left with a survival experience with a steep learning curve unless you commit to the quests. But you can’t commit to the quests 100% because you need to manage your resources and just survive. And with the game additionally giving you the liberty to progress without doing the quests, you may find yourself, like I did, building ahead of your level or trying to figure out complicated mechanics in the hopes they’ll help you have some stability for you to finally do the quests that were meant to teach you said mechanics. Complicated, I know. 

I was not supposed to be this far ahead at this point

In general, I would probably recommend doing one trial run following the quests religiously to learn what the game is and how to work with the mechanics and once that’s hammered in, a second playthrough in just survival mode with no quests is probably the best way to enjoy Medieval Dynasty.

Minimal Issues With Gameplay

As stated in my intro, Medieval Dynasty is not without its flaws. Besides the actual text being sub-par in engagement and grammar, the actual UI can be a bit jarring at times. And while I did manage to get past the other clunkiness in the game and learned to enjoy them for what they are, one thing I could not get past is the way text is displayed when exchanging words with a character. It’s been brought up that the white on white approach the game has doesn’t really work all that well. In general, talking to characters was my least favorite part of the game, and in big part due to this. 

Another thing that came up while I was playing the game is that you can’t close all of the radial menus using the Circle button on the PS5. I couldn’t tell you if this happens in absolutely every single menu, but it happened enough that it was noticeable. If I was inside a sub-menu 2, 3 or even 4 layers deep, I could use circle with not problem to backtrack all the way to the original radial menu. But from here, the Circle button would stop doing anything whatsoever. instead, I’d have to use the joystick to navigate to the “close” option of the radial menu in order to exit the menu. 

leveling up and using perks is a nice touch

Speaking of menus, when dealing with the game’s actual menu and its submenus, and not with the radial menus during gameplay, it felt to me like the layers ran a bit too deep and navigation could take a while to get used to. For instance, when assigning work to your villagers, you have a slider for the different activities they can do based on their profession so you can move the slider to indicate how much of an specific product or service you want them to focus on. You’d think that you’d be able to use your d-pad or joystick to move the slider to either side and increase/decrease the output, but no, because the D-pad and joystick are already bound to navigation within the menus, so instead you have to press X to increase the output and Square to decrease. You do get used to it, of course, but it is a strange choice, probably steaming from having to adapt the controls to an actual controller. 

Another slight annoyance is that if you are crouching, stalking some prey, and need to pause the game for whatever reason, once you come back to the game, it automatically returns you to being upright. So if you were close to the deer you were hunting and didn’t realize that you are no longer crouching when moving, you will make noise and the deer will run away. I kept forgetting that was happening and it did cause me to have to chase the deer more than once.

This NPC is virtually identical to the player’s character and you see him a lot early-game

All of these issues were small annoyances, and I did get used to working around most of them. I only kept falling for the un-crouching when pausing issue non-stop. I guess I never did get used to that one. Still, it just meant I’d have to run around chasing whatever I was hunting, no big deal. Once you learn your way around these small annoyances, then they don’t really get in the way all that much. 

Graphics & Sound

There is no way around it. Medieval Dynasty is a beautiful world to look at and explore. Walking up the hills and looking down the different parts of the valley, or walking through the forest, looking for prey, or just going from town to town is a great visual experience. The days are bright and full of life and the nights are gloomy and creepy, not unlike being out in the woods for real.

Nights can be challenging out in the wilds

You can also really tell the difference in seasons from the way the world looks, and the different color hues you can see here and there. It’s not just that winter has snow, to a certain extent it is the most important visual difference from one season to the next, but the amount and color of the foliage around you also evolves as the seasons change. 

Unfortunately, there were also slight issues with the graphics. Namely, some assets would unload when you walked away from them while still having them on your line of sight. If I was across the river from the first town and looking at it, the wall around it would only show partially, on the closest point to myself. As I moved closer, the rest of the wall would start to appear gradually. Following a PC reflex I did go into the setting to try and play around with the graphic settings, but being on PS5, there wasn’t much I could do to fix that. 

You’ll want to walk up the hills for the views

Another minor annoyance, but playing on console you are stuck in that regard. The character models were also a bit uninspired, with only a handful of designs repeating over and over again. They could have used some more variation.

Sound is good, the music is mostly tranquil and well done for a long, mostly relaxing session of city-building from the ground. The music does change when engaging in battle, which is a nice touch, but in general, is unremarkable in a good way. The different actions like chopping down a tree or building have their own distinct sounds, and you’ll get to listen to them all fairly quickly but they are also good. 

Medieval Dynasty was reviewed on PS5 with a key provided by Vicarious PR.