I have always been a passing fan of city building games. From Caesar III to Anno 1602/1603 I have tried and failed miserably to build successful cities and towns, creating a mighty empire covering the vast expanse of the map – only to have it fail miserably because of a water shortage or a complete lack of any settlement planning skills on my part.

Medieval Lords is one such game, taking you back about a bazillion years to medieval times where, believe it or not, they did not have Personal Computers and Microwaves and had to actively farm chickens and grow vegetables like reclusive country folk. Not being able to go back and visit our ancestral past could be argued a good thing, and with games like Medieval Lords we need not bother with time machines – we can experience it all from the comfort of our own living room.

Feeling more than a bit sceptical about just how graphical another city building game could be I decided to stick all the detail settings up to full and earnestly started the game. The result was somewhat like a slide show…albeit a very pretty one. The menu screen has a superbly detailed 3D background and, not unlike Age of Mythology, it reflects the stunning in-game graphics quite accurately. After knocking all the detail down a notch and having to restart the game for my changes to take effect I began playing.

The demo mission drops you in at the deep end with no tutorial and sees you starting out with a small settlement on the Isola of Monte Cristo, your goal is to kick some medieval butt by invading surrounding settlements to expand your realm and gain new building technologies and ultimately gain the ‘technology’ to build a stone bridge to a neighbouring island on which stands a lighthouse you must repair to guide ships to port.

The first thing that hit me when loading the game was how incredible the graphics are. Even on the lowered detail settings each building is highly detailed and people roam the dirt paths going about their daily medieval business. The game started paused so I had a quick look around and found a huge fortified city on a distant island, It was positively bustling with activity compared to my settlement and the detail of the structures and decorative gardens reflect what I would expect from a fully 3D version of Caesar. Zooming right in reveals just how intricately decorated every building is and with around 100 different buildings as boasted by the game it must be possible to build some magnificent looking cities. The game interface, however, was more than a bit plain with no pre-rendered ornate graphics like those you would see in practically every RTS game – the designers have clearly gone for functionality over aesthetics here, after all the interface is just something you push buttons on to make things happen in the rest of the game. The interface was easy enough to use and I quickly found my way around the game controls and figured out what everything meant – let’s hope there is a tutorial in the final game for the less hardened gamer though.

Music, which I can only describe as ‘jolly’ and ‘medieval’ with my limited vocabulary, plays in the background and unsurprisingly changes to thundering battle music when your settlement is threatened. The game is packed with sound and as you scroll your view over a settlement or city you can essentially hear what you see. However, Medieval Lords is set in a mystical land where cockerels crow incessantly so the involving sound effects quickly became irritating and I inevitably turned them down to avoid driving myself insane. Whilst the sound itself is excellent and as detailed as the graphics the more annoying sounds were repeated all too frequently.

Although there was no tutorial I found myself getting to grips with the game play quite quickly, that is to say I simply selected houses and stuck them everywhere in a slap-dash manner then added wells, chicken farms, pig farms and various other peripheral buildings until little green smile icons appeared over the houses. My point is that for the beginner the game can be easy to play and it is not frustratingly difficult to get a settlement built. Micro-management is kept to a comfortable bare minimum and largely involves the strategic placement of service buildings such as witches houses, graveyards and barns to keep your population happy and your coffers full.

Medieval Lords borrows a concept from many turn-based games of its ilk and employs the use of a small group of men to represent a vast army. These men can be deployed into defensive structures or enemy territory to both attack and defend. I could not find any way of controlling these armies when they attacked, I found that taking over a settlement or wiping out a barbarian camp was a simple manner of churning out troops from training camps and deploying them en-masse. This added no real strategic depth to the game and seemed quite a simple and uninvolved method of expanding your territory by annexing enemies’ villages and cities. I nevertheless had fun wiping out my neighbours and quickly covered the map with buildings.

Whilst little potential is shown by the demo it is, after all, just a demo. It definitely kept me entertained and despite the lack of a tutorial it managed to get to grips with it quickly. On my first try of the demo mission I was almost instantly wiped out by Vikings, to whom I did not pay a ransom. The second time my bolstered defences, refused to pay once more, and completely obliterated them. I got that warm feeling inside you can only get when a bully finally decides not only to pick on someone his own size but rather a large snarling dog with razor blades for teeth. Sadly the demo finished when I built a stone bridge to the island with the derelict lighthouse on it, I intended to keep playing and building my city until I had covered the map but it looks like I will have to wait for the finished game until I can build a mighty empire in my name.