PC (Microsoft Windows)Xbox OneNintendo Switch2024

Rising Lords

Rising Lords is a medieval turn-based strategy game with card and board game elements. Send your serfs to fight and die in your name... or let them prosper, and use them to your advantage!

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Mostly Positive

5 Steam reviews

Review History

Reviews

5 total

≥h

Steam User 0752STEAMNot recommended

[h1]Rising Lords[/h1]

My experience with this game was dreadful in so many ways that I'm stunned I experienced so many bad design decisions and poor game play choices in just two hours. I figured I'd have been playing 5 or more hours to encounter such incompetence.

Rising Lords is supposed to be a turn-based strategy game. What you get is a "hope you don't get totally screwed by randomness or lousy game design" simulator. It's truly stunning that this game has any positive reviews at all.

There are really two game play modes, a campaign and a single map mode. I didn't make it through much of the campaign because it's scripted to the point that there's no freedom there at all. What the game does is dictates exactly what I need to do by when,(take X City by Y Turn) or you lose. End of story. hile I expect events to happen during a campaign, I'd also expect that the developers would allow for some player agency to explore the mechanics of the game. They don't. The very first campaign mission requires you kill your opponent within 19 turns or the game is over. So you don't even get a chance to do your own thing - if you don't focus purely on building an army big enough to take that enemy within 19 turns, you're not winning. So everything you do has to be predetermined for that singular, timed event. That's not a strategy game. That's a puzzle game.

Note that what a player can build on the maps and where is also largely predetermined (more on that in a minute). Put those two together and you, Dear Reader, probably have quickly realized that you have virtually no player agency in the campaign. As a player, you can build certain types of buildings and raise an army. That's about it. There's no research tree. You can't build resource gathering spots and the handful of buildings you can build depend on those resources. And those buildings can't be built without the right resources, which you can't get without the pre-determined resource nodes. So what you can do 100% limited by the resource nodes you have in the area. You just can't build a resource node. It doesn't matter that the tile is a forest. If there's not a forestry already built, you can't build one.

I bailed on the campaign because I wanted to actually play the game with some agency rather than having to play a puzzle game, So I selected a map and started a scenario. I put the computer AI on easy so I could start to figure out how to play the game. Should be fun, right? Except my city - and the next one over - had no stone. That's a bit of an issue. If I have no stone, I can't build an armory. Without an armory I can't build an army because I can't make swords and armor (beyond simple and ineffective peasants, which isn't going to beat anyone). And with no army, I can't take a city with stone so I can build the armory to outfit my army. Oh and there's no trader around so I can't buy it either. WHAT THE HELL IS THIS CRAP?

Let's restart the same map and try again. Okay, the game must want me to make a lightning strike on the nearest city with stone (remember that lack of player agency?). On turn 1 - I'm not kidding here - I got an event. Someone stole all my taxes. No taxes = no army. Yep, my entire army was disbanded on Turn 1. Remember that whole "no stone, no armory, no armor, no army, no conquering cities" loop? Yeah, here we go again.

I'm stubborn though and gave it the good ole' college try. On attempt #3 on the 2nd turn, a bear attacked my resource node, effectively shutting it down and killing a peasant. If this were a game on disc, I would have thrown it across the room. Three strikes and you're out. This wasn't worthy of my time, never mind my money.

And beyond that pile of bollocks, let's talk about some other things that make this Baby's First Game design. The UI is terrible.

- Sometimes trying to move a peasant from one tile to another will cause "sticky" peasants and move all of them instead of just the one you want to move.
- Sometimes moving a peasant from one tile to another changes the tile production (had this go from wheat to a pasture field).
- Clicking sometimes doesn't work at all
- You should be able to scroll when you're on the map edges but you can't scroll South due to info bar being there
- Where you need to click isn't consistent or always apparent, like trying to build walls in a settlement requires you to click the edge of the map tile whereas you have to click the center of the tile for other items.
- The local army keeps jumping around from tile to tile. Considering it's grossly oversized and takes up about two tiles worth of space, this is VERY distracting.
- The same tutorial messages every time I start a game with seemingly no "don't show this again" button.
- The same 'don't exit when this icon is flashing' required every time I load the game with no opt out.
- The AI must be moronic. I put a city on auto and it decided to remove all of my civilians from one of the livestock fields. If I didn't manually intervene, that would have killed all my livestock. Because sheep obviously can't eat grass on their own.
- It also crashed once during launch.

That's a mess of issues. And it's not like the combat is going to save this game. The (albeit limited) combat I played wasn't engaging at all. It was very basic rock-paper-scissors tile based combat that you'd find in pretty much any game. Move two tiles and attack type stuff. I didn't see zones of control or anything that might provide a more in-depth experience. The only variable is that you can have cards that provide certain combat abilities. That's been done before many times and usually that doesn't provide enough tactical flexibility to truly make a difference. This is a game where I'd be pressing the auto-combat button repeatedly because it's just not deep enough to warrant my time and attention.

Folks, if you haven't figured it out by now, I think this game absolutely sucks. You should treat this like a piece of malware and never install it. Even if it's offered in a bundle for $1, buy something else. Even if you don't end up playing the other game it'll still be a better experience than trying to play Rising Lords.

Mar 15, 2026·2h·1·Verified

Steam User 9934STEAMRecommended

Fun

Mar 15, 2026·3h·Verified

Steam User 9487STEAMNot recommended

Campaign is on rails that absolutely steamrolls you if you don't know the exact combo the game wants you to build up from launch.

Mar 5, 2026·3h·1·Verified

Steam User 2140STEAMNot recommended

Spiel mit der schlechtesten Performance, die man sich vorstellen kann.

Feb 28, 2026·1152h·1·Verified

Steam User 8102STEAMRecommended

I loved the Lords of the Realm series (I and II) and decided to pick up Rising Lords. It adds some features to its spiritual successor, but the core idea is the same.

The management element of the game works. It is not too complicated to build up your economy and an army.

The combat is also turn based. You move around your units on a hexagon map and use cards to give buffs and debuffs. I liked the cardsystem to give it a bit more depth, but it's all still very straightforward.

The graphics are not too bad and I liked the artstyle.

I had a few hours of nostalgic fun. Give this a try If you are looking for a quick and casual strategy game in a medieval setting.

Feb 23, 2026·7h·1·Verified

LANGUAGE	AUDIO	SUBTITLES	INTERFACE
English	Y	Y	Y
Chinese (Simplified)	—	Y	Y
Chinese (Traditional)	—	Y	Y
French	—	Y	Y
German	—	Y	Y
Italian	—	Y	Y
Japanese	—	Y	Y
Korean	—	Y	Y
Polish	—	Y	Y
Portuguese (Brazil)	—	Y	Y
Russian	—	Y	Y
Spanish (Spain)	—	Y	Y
Turkish	—	Y	Y