Bite-sized Review:
Rising Lords

By Chris Picone, 16 March, 2025

Rising Lords is not what I expected.  At its heart, it's a turn-based tactical game that sees your loyal armies fighting off rebels and cultists and imperial armies while your brother tries to unite the kingdoms under his banner. But for a tactical game, it has a surprisingly deep plot, and is surprisingly well written. Rising Lords also features kingdom building elements, involving the management of your provinces, and card elements, both in and out of battle. There's a lot going on - and it's all executed in such a way that it feels like a board game come to life.

Aesthetics

Rising Lords is as lovely and bright and colourful as a Renaissance Fair. The world map is tile-based, displaying the fields and buildings of each of the provinces in a clear, functional, but still pleasing manner, that looks an awful lot like one might expect of a Euro board game.  Your peasants - and indeed your armies are shown as tokens, appearing as busts.  Everything has a lovely, hand-drawn look to it, and I really love the style. The UI's simple and looks good, with your kingdom resources across the top and provincial resources across the bottom, although some things are not where you might expect them to be. Much of the game's story is told through a little pop-up book as you hit key moments in the game, with the scenes gorgeously illustrated alongside. 

Gameplay

The kingdom management is very simple; although your provinces may have thousands of peasants, they are controlled through a much smaller number of functional peasant tokens. You can build more buildings as you grow but your food resources are capped and your peasant numbers can quickly become depleted as your citizens are drafted into your armies. Only buildings being worked by peasants produce anything and even then, only one item type at a time. So to equip a decent army may take either multiple turns, or multiple smiths, in order to produce all the helmets, weapons, and armour needed. So although simple, micromanaging the economy for all of your growing provinces can become unwieldy.  And time is of the essence - Rising Lords features many quests with turn-based time limits.  There is an AI function to automatically manage your provinces for you but, unfortunately, it's pretty awful and will quickly lead you to disaster. Side note: the game's save system is also really bad. Make sure you use the Save As function to prevent frustration.  These two glaring issues aside, the rest of the game's great.  Battlefield control is similarly simple; there are only a few unit types, but each has their own strengths and weaknesses, and you must make the most of the environment - forests for cover and hills for extra range, for example - in order to swing the odds in your favour. Your other tool is your deck of cards, purchased with experience, which let you equip your armies with ladders, traps, and all manner of special attacks and tricks.  

Verdict

I expected to enjoy Rising Lords but I actually enjoyed it far more than I had anticipated.  There were a few interesting quirks here and there but otherwise the combat and economy management were pretty much as I expected.  But I was pleasantly surprised by the story, and the way the quests carried me through it.

Links: 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/835650/Rising_Lords/