Medieval Engineers (PC)

Developer/Publisher: Keen Software House

Release Date(s): Feb. 19, 2015 (Early Access)

Genre(s): Building simulator, action

Platform(s): Windows

Language(s): English

Pricing: $19.99 / £14.99 / €18,99

Rating: None yet

Note: This game is still in Early Access, so the information in this review is subject to change.

A world of mass-produced dreams

So you want to build a house. But not just any little cottage in the woods–a gigantic manor filled with awesome and elegance. And you don’t want to do it by hand, gathering resources and crafting them into usable things, building brick by brick and laying down each and every post. No! You want to have all the supplies right there: walls, roofs, flooring sections, windows, doors, all of it. Right at your fingertips. Then I believe you've stumbled into the right place with Medieval Engineers. Single disclaimer: all of the buildings are not of my own construction. I enjoy using the copy/paste feature too much.

It’s a sandbox, kid, not a book

If you are looking for a title with a gripping campaign, then Medieval Engineers is definitely not it. The game has no story mode to speak of, barring a lackluster survival mode where you get to gloriously kill a few random barbarians. Though the inclusion of a thorough in-game tutorial would be appreciated, what would really be fun would be the abilty to use your siege engines to take down a series of ever larger castles.

My sandbox is prettier than yours

While the world of Medieval Engineers consists of a single, stagnant valley to play in, all told, the game's graphics and audio are really quite wonderful. The sountrack is mostly made up of various clunking and grumbling mechanical noises and the occasional grunt of an NPC. But all the sounds mesh together to make for a nice atmosphere. Though it's not the incredibly polished hyper-realism that some games feel the need to include (which makes me nauseous at times I hate to admit), if you have any complaints about the graphics in Medieval Engineers, you must be a very picky individual...you game snob.

Is it like a sandbox without the sand?

Do you recall the days when you used to play on the beach or in your backyard with those little plastic castle domes? You’d fill them with sand and then BLAM! Insta-castle. Well Medieval Engineers is exactly like that. You have fully functioning, pre-fabricated pieces ready to place, and then BOOM! You have a house. But what if you're building a city? Or a town? Or a hamlet, if that's your style. You don’t want to be bothered building rows of identical houses one by one to make the place feel less empty. Fortunately, Medieval Engineers has a wonderful little function for copying structures and pasting them. Yes. You can place entire buildings. And, perhaps the biggest cheat of them all, you can even download blueprints. All you have to do is visit the community and select the prints, then BEEP! With the push of a button or click or a mouse (or whatever you set your button to)…Building.

My Sandbox is a little small…

Unfortunately, for all the awesome that is Medieval Engineers, you don’t have the nigh infinite play space you have in certain other titles, titles known for blocky graphics, titles which shall not be named. But fear not! Within the confines of your mountain-y box canyon you can find plenty of space to build a city. Sure you won’t be able to build some mega-towering metropolis, but it’s more than enough to do what you need to do. If you actually have the time and the drive to build bigger, all I have to say to you is: kudos, you should consider a career as an architect.

My castle keeps falling down

If you have this problem and it's not due to crushing waves of ceaseless tidal motion wearing down your real-life beach-abode…you've encountered one of the little gems of Medieval Engineers. Structural integrity! Yes, for all of you who have so desperately wanted to test if your dream house is a feasible construction in a world full of pesky things like gravity and physics, this is a great place to start. The developer has a wonderful little video showing how everything in the game needs to be supported in one way or another, or can only bear so much weight, while they build a tower to the hig heavens. Then they turn on the structural integrity (you can toggle it off if you want to build wizard fortresses with impossible architecture) and the whole tower comes crashing down as the structure literally can’t hold its own weight. I personally find it endlessly amusing to watch my creations crumble into dust, as if I'm watching a building demolition of my own doing.

But can I put in some hermit crabs?

Why yes, you can. You can add NPCs to your world to populate your home and make it feel more lived in. However, be careful of the barbarians, as they like to beat you senseless and destroy everything you have lovingly crafted with your own hands. Fortunately, the combat system is easy and one click of the mace sends the barbarians off to dream land. While you won’t find yourself needing to build a port-a-john every five seconds, do feel free to think outside the box with your NPCs, build a prison, make them rats in your little maze. Shove them off ledges. Have fun with it all.

If I don’t like where my castle is, but I don’t want to destroy it

This is perhaps the most useful piece of all in my opinion. If you don’t want to destroy a structure you can pick the entire thing up and move it to a more desirable location. Of course, you need to be careful not to “accidentally” toss it into the nearby mountain range and watch it crumble with a poof into satisfying piecesto see the debris rain down on the hapless village that just so happens to be lying below…if you catch my drift. You can feel free to relocate your dwelling at any time. Or just copy-paste a new one!