Released as an Early Access game on June 01, Going Medieval is an affordable colony sim for people that don’t mind a feature incomplete game with staggered updates in exchange for their valued feedback and suggestions on what direction the developers Foxy Voxel should take the game next.
Foxy Voxel is a relatively new independent studio that was formed in 2018, and has been spending the last 3 years developing their first game Going Medieval. The game can be found available for PC on Steam and the Epic Games Store.
In the world of Going Medieval, dark age society is on its knees. The game picks up in 14th-century England after a plague has ravaged 95 percent of the population.
You lead a band of survivors that have emerged from the ashes of society. It’s up to you to decide on the location of their new settlement. Do you choose to lead them to the lush, fertile soils of the valleys. Perhaps you think heading to the hills will yield your survivors with precious metals that they can trade with other settlements. Or maybe you wish to take them deep in to the mountains and get them to dig out an underground network of living chambers.
Your survivors must architect a new civilization, out in the reclaimed nature, with a little direction from yourself of course. You are given three colonists with randomly generated stats with some basic supplies: wood, linen, a short bow, and a few pre-packaged meals. The objective is to keep them alive and, ideally, thriving and happy enough to do anything you may ask of them.
Sleep is an important factor in everyone’s life, one of your first tasks should be constructing a small cabin with hay beds and some form of cover to protect them from nature. Then, as you collect more wood from felling the nearby forests or iron from digging out some of the nearby hills. Your small wooden and hay cabins quickly expand from almost primitive hunter-gathering societies to a rich agriculture based town full of storage houses and a castle offering protection.
To truly succeed it takes some time to just hit the pause button and to learn more about each of your survivors. Not only do they have different strengths and weaknesses, but they have preferences and characteristics that may make you think twice about asking them to do a particular task.
You may find that one of your survivors happens to be nocturnal, receiving a production bonus when they work at night, whereas another survivor may be clumsy and prone to self-harm when working too long without a leisure activity to break up their day. Their entire hourly life is completely in your hands as you can set their schedules for when they wake up, when they should start and finish working and even what tasks you want them to prioritize or even forget about as they walk around your settlement trying to fill in any gaps in their day.
As soon as you get the foundations built, it almost becomes a well-oiled machine, where one survivor will tend to the fields, another will haul any produce to your allocated storage areas and another will use the food to produce meals for the settlement. Or, you may end up doing what I did, and just let your camp run around like headless chickens trying to do everything and anything you queue up jobs for. (spoiler: it doesn’t go too well, and you may find that your survivors never find time to grow and harvest enough food for the winter).
Failure in Going Medieval is only briefly felt. Occasionally you’ll take in a new survivor and in doing so get a countdown until an enemy attacks for you taking in their refugees. If you happen to forget to send your settlement to sleep earlier in the day to compensate for the lack of sleep you’ll know they will get because of the attack, it won’t destroy all of your hard-work. Though it can slow down your production chains slightly if you took on any deaths.
Everything being said, there is a lot that can be improved upon in the game. With there already being a plethora of features that we feel are missing, thankfully, a lot of them are already on the development roadmap.
In addition to those listed in the roadmap (see the gallery below), we would also love to see;
- The ability to place water to form functional moats around your settlement
- The ability to place cubes of soil, dirt or resources to fill in gaps in the terrain
- A more user-friendly way of seeing through the different depths of your buildings
- The ability to save blueprints for structures so you can start a new game quicker and with some familiarity
- Multiple settlements on the same map, with the ability that your camps will fight one another
Final Say
Here at Evolved2Game we stand by the theory that for every $1 a game costs, you should be able to get that many hours of enjoyable gameplay from it. With it costing $28.99 (CAD) on Steam with no discounts and us clocking in almost 20 hours over the weekend testing the game out, we can say the game has almost reached a satisfactory value for money rating, even with only a few of the developers timeline of features currently baked in.
As mentioned above, there are some key features that we would love to see put in to the game before we can be truly happy, however, it is listed as an Early-Access game going in, so we knew that we were only getting the most basic of experiences.
