Medieval Dynasty is an open-world medieval town-building survival simulator, so it’s like several great games rolled into one. Now, I do own this on PS5, so I came into this having already played it before, and I’m not mad about it. Developed by Render Cube and published by Toplitz Productions, Medieval Dynasty is an amazing blend of story-based RPG and simulation.

There is an overarching story to Medieval Dynasty and plenty of side quests to both keep you busy and to grant materials and prestige to help with the true concept of this game – creating and running a village. To progress, you need to complete the main quests, and this will enable you to expand your village and add more buildings. Along with the story and side quests, you can also get people from other villages to join yours, and even romance NPCs to gain a wife and have children to continue your legacy. This game has so much to offer content-wise, and you could honestly spend years playing it as you try new areas to build your village and improve the layout after your first attempt.

First and foremost, you can make a custom game that allows you to adjust the stats of enemies and the basic difficulty of the game, making it either too easy or extremely challenging. I found I preferred using a mouse and keyboard over a controller for this game, but I think it’s because it’s easier to place buildings with a bit more precision, and this also comes into play when you aim and fire ranged weapons, or block and hit with melee weapons.

I like the ease of this game, even more so once you get used to the buttons, and I highly recommend going through the hotkeys in the settings, because although there is a tutorial, it runs throughout the main story quests so if you plan on jumping straight into a custom game, you best check them out.

A good tutorial mechanic is when things that aren’t shown in the options just happen in the game, so a popup will give you all the information you need. For example, the first time you get hungry and thirsty, a popup will tell you what will happen if you don’t eat and drink and what to do. You can also upgrade skills depending on what tasks you are doing, such as if you have been hunting for a while, you can gain a skill point for your hunting skill tree and so on. This gives the incentive to go out and forage, build, and talk to people. All will increase your skill levels.

Using Unreal 5 ticks pretty much all of the graphics options for me. It looks really good, especially the landscapes and environment, the trees, water streams, and the rocky hillside. Even the people and animals looked great as well. Though, like everything, it’s not perfect. There are some cases of floating shrubs and some poorly placed items that are a pain to retrieve, but all in all, I love the look, and rarely did I notice any dips in the frame rate or problems with the landscape rendering.

The music is very subtle in the Medieval Dynasty. Instead, it focuses more on the natural sounds of water running along a stream and the sounds of animals grazing across the bushland, and the sounds are perfectly captured in stereo, so you can easily tell what direction they’re coming from, and to an extent, how far away they are. There is not a lot of voice acting, just the occasional one-liner and the initial opening sequence, but for a game like this, where I believe it’s meant to be pretty chill, less is more.

Medieval Dynasty hits all the marks for me as a survival simulator. It’s fun. You get to build an entire village, much like Sim City, but not quite as expansive, and it’s full of depth. I am addicted to this game, and I have restarted so many times for the sole purpose of wanting to build in a different area and explore more to get a better start. Oh, and that is not all.

To continue the Dynasty games, they have also recently released Sengoku Dynasty, which is Medieval Dynasty in Japan, and you bet I’ll be jumping on that. To top it all off, Medieval Dynasty and Sengoku Dynasty are on sale right now on Steam, just in time for the Christmas holidays.

Written by: Adam Brasher