Maroc - 3RD-STRIKE.COM - A La Une - 12/Jul 03:47

Lords and Villeins: The Great Houses DLC – Review

While Honestly Games’ Lords and Villeins ended up as one of our backlog reviews last year, it didn’t take us as long to return to the medieval city-building sim. The reason? The arrival of The Great Houses, a brand new expansion for the game that was released just last month. We quite liked Lords and Villeins, describing it as a hidden gem. Even so, we didn’t quite expect The Great Houses to impact our enjoyment of the game dramatically. Let’s take a look at what you can expect. When we took a look at Lords and Villeins last year, one of our main takeaways was the absence of any sort of combat mechanics. That has changed now that the game has received its first major DLC. The Great Houses adds a smorgasbord of new mechanics to the once seemingly peaceful city-building sim. Now, you’d expect combat to take up center stage in The Great Houses, but in practice, this boils down to very simple turn-based affairs. These are part of a much more intricate layer of gameplay. The Great Houses is all about your own realm finding its place in the medieval pecking order. You start by creating your own house, with its own crest and your city-building experience starts out as always. However, you can zoom out to the world map to find that there are now neighboring realms, including a kingdom that holds absolute power. Let’s not kid anyone though: you’re going to want to aim for the top of the food chain. And sure, you can achieve this through brute force, but there are more efficient ways, like politics. We won’t be going over the gameplay basics again here as we’ve already covered them in our review of the base game. The Great Houses is all about building relationships with the other houses. You can forge diplomatic relationships and establish trade routes, or you can simply invade another realm to raid its resources. The diplomatic route relies on Favor points, although there’s always cold hard cash too. The new mechanics integrate seamlessly instead of feeling tacked on. This also means that The Great Houses doesn’t dramatically change the flow of the game: this is still a leisurely paced city building sim first and foremost. If you were hoping for The Great Houses to turn Lords and Villeins into a full-fledged strategy game/management sim, we’d recommend looking up Rising Lords instead. There’s not a whole lot that has changed about the game’s audiovisual presentation. The new “world map” fits with the previously established aesthetics, and we enjoy the transition effect where a curtain of clouds opens and closes. Being able to create your own house crest is a nice touch, but it is understandably limited, given the game’s pixel art visuals. The soundscape is still as bland and disappointing as it was prior, unfortunately. Looking at The Great Houses’ value, we’d say that picking it up is a no-brainer if you already have the base game. While there isn’t a whole lot of new content here at the surface level, we always felt that Lords and Villeins felt incomplete without any sort of conflict mechanics, and you sure are getting those here. If you don’t have the base game yet, then we do recommend waiting for a sale, as the game fairly regularly goes on sale. A bundle including both the base game and the DLC exists, and it’s your best option – we wouldn’t go back to “vanilla” Lords and Villeins after having had a taste of The Great Houses. It seems power corrupts after all. Conclusion If you’ve already been managing your own medieval city in Lords and Villeins, then we outright urge you to expand that experience with The Great Houses, as this small expansion exponentially improves the gameplay. If Lords and Villeins didn’t seem all that interesting to you beforehand, then The Great Houses isn’t going to convince you to pick it up, since it doesn’t outright change the flow of the game. What it does do, however, is make Lords and Villeins feel complete, with features that we didn’t even know we missed.