Mini Review: Rising Lords (Switch)

What is this, the Dark Ages?

Version Reviewed: European

review by Trent Cannon 53m ago

There is a king’s ransom of strategy games on Switch, so it takes a lot for one to stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately, Rising Lords from developer Argonwood is memorable for all the wrong reasons. With hollow, tedious gameplay and a combat system that tries to combine too many elements, we were ready to leave Rising Lords in the Dark Ages almost as soon as we began playing.

Set years after the previous king was overthrown and replaced with a council, Rising Lords follows a young nobleman who unexpectedly finds himself thrust into the heart of a battle for land, eventually rising as a lord — see what we did there? — of note. The story campaign’s plot plays out in a series of choose-your-own-adventure style encounters that help shape your youthful lord and his personality. It isn’t remarkable or groundbreaking but we found it enjoyable enough to keep us interested in the game beyond when the gameplay made us want to switch off.

Rising Lords’ main gameplay comes in two main parts, both frustrating in their own way. The kingdom management requires you to rebuild your territory following your father’s death, which means building things to keep the population happy and allocating peasants to work your fields, forests, and mines. This requires a bit of resource balancing, finding the right taxation and ration levels for each season, and making sure the locals themselves don’t rise up.

The process is more tedious than fun, something that is more of an issue because of the lacklustre tutorial that kicks off the story. You can let the optional AI management handle the kingdom management for you, but it makes such baffling choices about peasant placement that it becomes a question of which is a bigger hassle. Not the kind of balancing act a strategy game should be asking you to perform.

To gain new territory, you will need to wage war on your neighbours, which means raising an army and marching to the field of battle. Battles are fairly straightforward. Despite the deckbuilding mechanics that feel tacked on, most battles just require that your numbers are bigger than your opponents; if so, you’ll probably win the day.

The biggest mark against the Switch version of Rising Lords, however, is the excessive lag between each turn. Each click in either the combat or kingdom management sections of the game can take several seconds to register, which makes even simple actions a chore. We also frequently found that peasants wouldn’t load onto the map, making it difficult to know where we needed to send our workers to improve our lands. The lag was even worse in our time with the game’s online multiplayer, which saw the server straining to keep up with each turn. An hour into a game and the map took five minutes to load between rounds.

These faults, combined with imprecise touchscreen input and frustratingly implemented cursor controls for the Switch port, undo any goodwill the charming, medieval-manuscript-inspired visuals or Renaissance faire-esque music might have imparted. The map editor offers some fun tweaks to the core gameplay but can’t save the game from its design flaws and interminable lag. It’s a shame, but in its launch state, Rising Lords simply isn’t worth picking up.