Who doesn’t love a good survival game, even more so when it has a Medieval setting? Bellwright is a game that is currently in early access on Steam but it’s also a game that I didn’t hear anything about until I was lucky enough to be offered a chance to cover it.
I booted up my PC, blew away the dust and cobwebs and loaded up steam to install Bellwright. While it was installing, I did a bit of digging and watched trailers, read up about the game on its website and instantly fell in love. I couldn’t wait for the installation to finish so that I could jump into Bellwright and get a taste of Medieval life.
Donkey Crew are a game studio based in Wroclaw, Poland. The original members of the team are diehard modders from the Mount and Blade community. After coming together from all over the world they became a studio. In Bellwright you must establish and expand your settlements, liberate the land and assist its villagers, and recruit others to your cause while learning more about a life you had to leave behind.
Command forces, prove your valor through combat, and cement yourself as the hero of your people. Embark on quests like never before and uncover an expansive world, where you can build your settlement and lead your people to freedom.
In the story you find yourself playing as someone who got framed for the accidental death of the prince. The Crown has ordered your death and one day you manage to survive an attempt on your life. However, you come across a contract on the assassin’s body that raises a lot of questions. Wanting to find answers you decided to come out of hiding and go back to the place you escaped. Lead a rebellion against your homeland’s oppressive sovereign and uncover the truth of your family’s secrets.
When you start no one trusts you. You try and find shelter in the local village only to be told that you must set up shop elsewhere. After finding your first location and building your first shelter you can begin building your settlement. Until you get NPCs in your settlement to help you out, the resource grind can be quite long. Finding certain resources is harder than others and it makes it even more frustrating as your inventory feels so limited. You can only carry one or two logs at a time and the more advanced structure requires more so be prepared for a lot of walking.
Bellwright follows the same formula when it comes to this genre. Gather, hunt, build and craft. It is made easier by recruiting NPCs to your settlement to help. This will help expand and make collecting resources, fighting and progression that whole lot easier.
When you get NPCs they can be used as workers, companies or fighters. Workers will help with reaching new technologies and collecting resources to name a few. The fighter will defend your settlements against enemies and then companies can come out and about with you while you explore, quest, and uncover more of the story. Having NPC does come with some management though as you need to make sure that they are happy within your village and that they are well fed.
Your character can unlock and level up perks to improve certain stats and abilities. I do like the melee combat in Bellwright I like that you can choose the direction the weapon strikes the enemies by using your mouse movements. I also love using the bow even if it did take an awfully long time to get a hold of one.
The building mechanics are a bit odd, once you have collected the resources you can either store them until you have all the elements you need to complete the building, or you can do it bit by bit.
When building there are numerous nods scattered around that you must interact with and clicking on them will build segments of the building. This can get tedious with the bigger structures however once you get NPCs in the settlement, they will help with the building, so you only have to put up with it for the early stages of the game.
It is a sold building mechanic, it is simple enough it would have been nice to have been able to customise the looks of some of the buildings as your village can just become dull and bland though this might be something they can implement before launch.
Graphically the open world of Bellwright is beautiful and a joy to explore. I had to amend my graphic settings as running the game on ultra at times would make the frame rate drop and the game stutter. In the end, I had to have a mixture of high and medium settings that made the game run smoothly and without issue. There are currently very limited customisation options for your character but I’m hoping more will be added closer to the game’s full release.
NPC feel quite generic and doesn’t majorly stand out as hero characters if you will. The important ones are the ones that dish out the quests but even then, you get stale dialogue and will get the opportunity to pick how to respond. I’m hoping this becomes more engaging as the game continues developing. It would be nice if the NPC had a bit more character about them and offered more interaction options than just a chat for quests. On the plus side, you can pet the cats, so potential game of the year here.
With Bellwright being a survival crafting game there are plenty of hours of gameplay at your fingertips, whether you are playing alone or with friends you will spend a large chunk of your time resources hunting, exploring, and managing your settlements. Bellwright does a good enough job to keep you hooked and playing with its addictive survival crafting gameplay. However, I would have liked to have seen more elements thrown in to make the experience go from average to amazing.
Conclusion
With Bellwright being in early access you are bound to come across some teething issues. That being said, Donkey Crew are pushing out patches and fixes which shows the players that the team care about their game and wants to make sure it is working. There is a lot of potential for Bellwright to be a fantastic survival game and up there with the greats, however, at the moment, I do feel as though it is an average survival game in the evenly expanding amount of survival crafting games that are coming out on PC.
It runs the risk of being forgotten if it doesn’t make itself a bit more unique. There are elements to Bellwright that I like but you can find these in other survival crafting games. Don’t get me wrong I do enjoy playing Bellwright, I’m just struggling to place it above any of the survival games that I currently play such as Ark and Sons of the Forest. I will be keeping a close eye on the game as it works through early access and will continue to jump in and play as this is one of those games that I’m rooting for and hope it will take off.
Bellwright Trailer
For more previews head here https://invisioncommunity.co.uk/category/previews/
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