This game is nuts.
It contains so much level of progress I dont recall seeing in other games even bannerlord.
You can use some glitches to your advantages such as killing bandints by your own by using the structures to block their patch. You can pretty much just solo raid and defend even on the hardest diff while your villagers are chillin and producin home.

You can take which patch you love.

This game is like medieval manager 2024 plus action combat, plus crafting sim, exploration sim and so on.

It has really great graphics and it feels real.

Really unique game

Its like bannerlord, medieval life simulator and others came into one.

In this game you dont need to chase a money, you can just enjoy the progress and manufacture everything by our own.

Has less bugs than most full releases. No question, there is some jank here; but its a fun janky that you can really dig into. so much to do and slow progression. This is great, because you don't just become god tier in a couple hours. I'm really enjoying this game. Doesn't feel like early access, though it could definitely use polish.

TLDR at bottom

Game is fun and combat is passable 1v1. However if you have even two enemies on you at one time they all just try to get INSIDE your hitbox. In other words all the enemies try to stand exactly where you are standing; just running into you and attacking. Not only does this look ridiculous and break immersion, but it makes combat (no matter how good you are at it) incredibly frustrating and difficult. It is a real shame too because if they just gave the weapons a bit more weight and the hits a bit more "stick" to them it would feel pretty decent. There also needs to be a major weapon differentiation overhaul. The ONLY difference in one handed and two handed weapons is the damage they deal (and why the hell does a lumberaxe deal more damage than a 2handed battle axe). All the weapons moves feel the same too.

The village management is pretty engaging, at least in the early game I have experienced. The inventory system is miserable where nothing in your backpack stacks. The game also uses the outdated personal inventory system from games of yore where weight is not calculated but items take up a different amount of grids in your backpack.

The progression of crafting is pretty bizarre and frustrating; for instance a mining pick needing a whole mining camp to be researched prior to the pick being learnable. The research tree screen is completely unhelpful as navigating it is really poorly implemented (it's more like zooming in and out of a laggy photo). Finding out what you have to research in order to get something better down the line is also confusing.

As mentioned earlier fighting more than 1 bandit at a time is frustrating as hell. Fighting more than 2 bandits at a time is impossible. To fight three you have to save scum and try and use the terrible pathing AI to your advantage (the AI enemies wont jump/climb over a 1 foot high wall). You can bring your followers but if they get incapacitated and respawn at your camp you have to wait until their "wounded" debuff wears off before taking them out again because if they get incapacitated a second time with the wounded debuff they die permanently.

All of the NPC's are represented on the map as white dots for friendly/neutral and red dots for hostile. The quest givers are marked differently but the shopkeepers and NPC's that have skills for hire are not differentiated. This makes looking for things in villages absolute hell especially since the majority of the NPC's walk around. You can only mark one quest giver at a time on the map, even if you have 20 quests.

The map is large and travel can be a little slow so they have introduced road signs that you can build to fast travel. It helps out a lot but it is just frustrating. For instance, you cannot use fast travel when you have companions with you or there are enemies within like a quarter mile range. I've also rarely had it happen where the signs just become unresponsive. The worst aspect of the signs is that they have to be a large distance away from towns, making them even less useful.

All of the bandit camps I have found so far have reused assets. The same tents, carts and chests. All of the bandits do the same thing, wander around in circles grunting like they are from an MMO front 1999. There's no way to sneak up quietly and pick any off. Theres no way to hide in the bushes and draw them out one at a time. The AI is the same as that 1999 MMO where if one enemy spots you, all of them become clairvoyant, know where you are, and beeline towards you. There is no immersion regarding NPC's in this game... they just wander around and grunt (and use terrible AI voices).

Liberating a town is fun until you realize that they want you to build stuff for them, but refuse to let you gather ANY resources in a mile radius around the town (even rocks and sticks on the ground). To make matters worse trees do not grow back when cut down. You can't build those fast travel signs by a town either, remember?

Balance is probably the thing that made me quit playing the most. The bandits get stronger the further you progress. They also wander the map constantly; even into your town. They slaughter all your villagers when you aren't there and you can fast travel there because the signs don't work when enemies are near. Not that it matters because the rate at which the bandits progress in strength makes them outperform your villagers and warrior by a large margin.

We might have a real gem here if they polish this up a ton. However, with all the reused assets, mediocre textures, Unreal Engine 5 store bought assets, and AI voiceovers I have a feeling that the devs are just going to work on this as long as money is coming in and abandon it long before its finished. The devs have already done this to one of their games and Snail Games (the producer) is absolutely notorious for grabbing cash as long as they can from a sick cow (look at Ark and Ark Ascended). Ark Ascended was supposed to be free to everyone that owned Ark and now they are charging money for the game, for DLC, and for individual new dinosaurs.

This is also very obviously a Snails Game Communist Party production. They have tried to faithfully reproduce a medieval setting and village but left off one of the first buildings every erected in those times...a church. There is no religion in this game as far as I have seen other than decayed pagan shrine you find out in the wild that you can loot. Whether you are religious or not, this is communism at it's finest censoring realism in our games due to their oppressive and intolerant ideology.

TLDR- There is a LOT going for this game and it really sucked me in hardcore. However with terrible balancing, really janky and cheesy combat, awful inventory system, and multitude of poor design decisions I don't think this is going to get out of EA since it is owned by Snail Games.

PS- This game suffers from AMD syndrome that a lot of games do. On my PC with an Nvidia it runs fine. On my PC with an AMD it crashes everytime I switch windows and about once per hour on its own. While I admit AMD is largely to blame due to their AWFUL software, this is beyond acceptable on AMD's top of the line card at the time of this writing.