When you’re first dropped into the world of Medieval Dynasty, it comes across as any other survival sandbox game out there – think Rust, Ark: Survival Evolved, Days, or the more recent Valium. At this point, you’re thinking either “Sweet! I know exactly what I need to do”, or “FFS! I already know exactly what I need to do”. In either case, your reaction is understandable. However, there’s more to Medieval Dynasty than meets the eye, and we’re going to explore everything the game has to offer in this here review. Let’s crack on!
What? There’s a story??! Yes and no. Essentially, you need to do the story in order to unlock and gain access to stuff. However, we’d recommend you do the story anyway, because it also serves as a tutorial of sorts to help players get accustomed to new gameplay systems and mechanics.
Medieval Dynasty is a mishmash of many gameplay elements and genres. Most of which work together fairly well. Let’s start with the obvious, the Survival Sandbox elements. There’s a reason the game initially feels like all those games we mentioned in the intro. It’s pretty much the same, pick up stones and sticks, craft an axe, chop trees, get logs, get access to more tools, gather better materials, and so on. You will use said materials to build your village as well, starting with your very first house. However, you will eventually hit a wall. Remember how we told you progression is tied to the story? Yeah. So you’ll need to do some running around and be an errand boy for a bit. So ultimately it might be worth it to do some running around.
Other than the story, there are other factors which limit your access to more advanced buildings and tools. These are your skill levels. There are a total of six skills in the game, including Extraction, Hunting, Farming, Diplomacy, Survival, and Production. Each of these skills have their own skill tree, with abilities to help you benefit more from said skills and utilize them more efficiently. In order to actually level these skills up, all you need to do is actually use them. Yep, just like in The Elder Scrolls games, you wanna get good at hunting? Go hunt. Resource gathering? Better get to it. Sure, it’s grinds – all such games are – but the introduction of levels and skill trees adds a sense of progression and achievement; something to work towards, which is nice. I should also point out that a lot of the stuff you can craft is locked behind schematics, which you need to buy with in-game money. You’ll need to go out and trade with vendors in order to make money. Again, in typical RPG fashion, you could probably just sell the excess stuff you craft to level up a skill in order to make money.
The addition of quests, a skill tree, and how doing things improves your skills gives the game a very RPG feel, something that is unique to Medieval Dynasty. At least as far as I know, when sandbox survival games are concerned.
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