How do you like building your cities? There’s real appeal in a godlike, top-down view as you become a sort of all-seeing invisible mayor in a city builder. But there’s definitely something engaging about having your boots on the muddy ground as you carve a town out of the wilderness and fill it with citizens you can look right in the eye.
Noble Legacy is of the second variety: a medieval city builder where you play as a person (in third-person) and not a ghost mayor. You arrive in a tiny, neglected little town of just a few grubby citizens, and start cleaning the place up: collecting resources, building structures, and putting the villagers to work while attracting new ones to your growing city.
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If that sounds like your jam, great news: there’s a demo out now on Steam. It’s fairly short but gives you a good look at the start of the full game: setting up a few production buildings like a woodcutter and fishing hut, placing a storage building and setting up a market, and most critically, organizing your workforce and assigning people jobs.
Your citizens have attributes, so don’t just cram them into various occupations without putting a little thought into it. One newcomer named Fernando requested to work alongside women, which honestly made me worry that he was a bit of a creep—but when I put him to work with Ethel, my fisherwoman, the productivity of my fishing hut got a boost. I don’t know what those two are doing in there, but it’s resulting in more fish being caught so I’m gonna allow it!
There are also little quests that pop up from time to time. Someone got drunk and passed out in my town’s temple, so I had to run around picking up trash in a timed challenge—odd for a city builder, but it was refreshing to suddenly be rushing around instead of just chilling out. There’s also a bit of combat: a thief showed up one night and my companion and I dispensed with him with our swords. The building system can be done piece by piece or by using building templates, so if you’re not a gifted builder (like me) your town can still look like a town instead of a series of large wooden boxes.
Noble Legacy is a bit reminiscent of a game like Medieval Dynasty: not only do you build a town but you live in it and deal with the villagers face-to-face. The demo is a bit too short to fully get into it, and it’s plenty rough around the edges—but hey, it’s a demo. Noble Legacy enters early access on Steam in July.
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