As it is now, I cannot recommend this game. There are too many problems that outweigh the things the game does well.

I’ll start off with the positives.

Graphically the game looks very nice. Landscapes are detailed, villages look great, and your character customization options are vast. There is an abundance of armor and weapons to choose from that all look detailed and realistic.

I’m a sucker for games that let you automate processes and reward you for strategic planning and logistics, and Bellwright does that pretty well. From placing a barn for storage, to choosing the perfect location for an outpost that your caravans can easily reach, there are a lot of little decisions that can have a big impact.

There is also a decent story to follow and a plot that keeps you decently invested. If you care about that, there aren’t many games like this that also offer a narrative element that is at least somewhat engaging.

Now for the (many) negatives

The combat in this game is laughable. Directional attacks in these kinds of games are nothing new, and they can work out very well and be engaging, but Bellwright completely fails to do that. Swings are weightless and have no feedback, whether hitting an enemy or being blocked. Enemies swarm you in a giant deathball making fighting anything more than 1 person at a time extremely difficult. Luckily bows are so insanely broken that you never need to use anything else. I solo’d every single bandit encounter, bandit camp, and raid just by endlessly kiting them and shooting them in the face. Combat is totally meaningless and boring.

To piggyback on the player combat, the large scale battles are equally ridiculous. If you are expecting the level of troop management and tactics as a game like Bannerlord, prepare to be disappointed. The entirety of the commands you can give your troops are hold position, go to position, and charge. That’s it. Charge just leads to your deathball colliding with their deathball and whoever has more expendable meatshields wins.

I cannot overstate how atrocious the job system for your villagers is. It's hard to even say it exists because all you get is a set of priorities for them, you have almost no control over who does what. To give an example, I was struggling with having my villagers remove meat from a cooking station before it got burnt. I went so far as to disable all other priorities for one villager other than cooking. You would think that they would do nothing but man the cooking station and cook whatever is in queue, but it is way more esoteric than that. Each production queue is split into multiple hidden ‘jobs’ that must be completed. In order to smoke some meat, meat has to be delivered (delivery job). Then the meat has to be placed in the smoker (cooking job) and then the meat has to be removed and stored (another delivery job). At each one of those jobs, the game assigns the task to any available villager that has that priority open, even if it is the lowest level. Even if they just finished another job on the other side of the map and have to take 10 REAL TIME minutes to walk back. This is just for an extremely basic cooking production, there are more complicated ones with more than 6 ‘jobs’. There are DOZENS of different production jobs that you will need your villagers to do in order to grow your settlement and each one has to be fulfilled like this.

The problems with villagers also cause huge problems with the game’s progression and pacing. The game does have a nice, rewarding feeling progression. The problem is how long it takes to reach new milestones and tiers. I spent 30 hours of my 33 hour playtime in houses that were basically just piles of sticks, using production buildings that were piles of sticks, and storing goods in piles of sticks. You don’t unlock good looking, actual ‘village’ buildings until tier 2 and the grind to get there is enormous. There is also a huge grind to get your villagers and armies equipped with decent equipment. It does not feel like the game respects your time.

The performance is also abysmal. I have a 9070xt and a 7800X3D and this game still chugs at random spots for no reason. I’m talking dips into 40fps at medium-high settings with frame gen enabled. There is really no excuse for this optimization.

All of the voice acting in the game is AI. It wasn’t a big deal to me, I just turned it off and the devs have said it is only a temporary placeholder but I know that is a deal breaker for some people.

With all of that said, I do intend to check the game out later in its development but I have little hope based on the dev’s previous abandoned projects.

I can reccomend this game with only a few caveats. Its a good 9/10 game. I love the systems in place but they just need a lot more work, but of course its an early access game and marketed as such. Id invest early and watch this game grow. The combat feels good even for a newbie like me and you dont *really* have to get involved too much, you can just send 8 peasants to their death fighting for you. The city building feels nice, the resource gathering isnt too grindy with resources mostly becoming farmable pretty easily.

TLDR; Good game, needs time to grow, CAN I STOP GETTING STABBED IN MY ASS 9/10

There's a point you reach in the game where it becomes completely redundant and I can pinpoint it.

As soon as I start needing straps, the micromanaging becomes not worth it, to me this game was good for about 6 hours.