Medieval Dynasty VR Review - A Good VR Crafting and Building Game

Today we're going to get in depth with Medieval Dynasty New Settlement, a VR port by Spectral Games of the flatscreen game Medieval Dynasty by Render Cube.

The flatscreen game has been around for a while, originally released in 2021, and according to Steam reviews is pretty well received and sold well. Medieval Dynasty New Settlement, or rather Medieval Dynasty VR, is a rebuilding of the concept of the original flatscreen game from the ground up for the Meta Quest, and features the same focus on surviving, crafting, and building yourself up from a simple peasant to the well respected owner of your own sprawling medieval estate, except now it's all in Virtual Reality!

Building a wall in Medieval Dynasty New Settlement

Medieval Dynasty VR Is Focused On Creating

So how is it? Well if you're a fan of chiller and less action oriented VR experiences that involve a lot of crafting, building, and generally just doing virtual tasks like chopping trees, mining, and making virtual items over and over as you build your settlement and expand your wealth, then you'll find a lot to love in this game.

That is if you can get past the many bugs and technical issues this game has, as well as some very lazy feeling oversights that make the game feel kind of rushed overall, though hopefully those will be fixed with more patches like the first hotfix that just came out.

While you'll rarely fight for your life and really have to focus on how to "survive" in Medieval Dynasty New Settlement, there's a lot of satisfaction to be had in its many different kinds of crafting systems, and mostly in turning a pristine wilderness into your own vision of a medieval town.

That's because you start the game in both the Adventure and Sandbox modes as a nobody with hardly anything but the clothes on your back. As a new arrival to Green Valley, you've got to do some virtual work to establish yourself

Chopping down a tree in Medieval Dynasty VR

Work Your Way From Peasant To Lord

First, you build a house, do some tasks for the locals to get their respect, and learn more about what you can create through either the quests in Adventure mode or just trying out new things as you please in Sandbox mode. At the start, nobody knows or respects you, and you've got nothing but an empty plot of land and ambition.

You have to gather resources with your VR hands, and then with those same hands use those resources to build more buildings on your land and craft various items to use or sell. Over time you can even hire people to work on your estate for you, and romance and marry to have children and continue your dynasty. Medieval Dynasty VR aims to be a medieval life simulator like the first game, and largely succeeds at this, while also incorporating all of the magic of physically performing the work you need to do these things with VR tracked hand controls.

Sandbox mode releases you into the game world capable of building anything that you want, while Adventure mode has a series of story quests for you to do centered around the two existing towns in Green Valley. These quests function like extended tutorials with a lot of reading text boxes and fetching items for people in between.

The story itself wasn't hugely interesting, and really got boring at some points, but it would shortly pick itself back up with an exciting journey into the unknown or a new type of building or type of crafting to try.

There are many Quests to do in this VR game, but many of them end up feeling the same

In adventure mode you unlock new buildings by doing story quests, and while that was a little frustrating at times, for instance not being able to do any sort of farming until VERY far into the game, the quests do function as a great way for the game to naturally teach you its many gathering and crafting systems.

If you want to be taught how to do all of the things you can do in Medieval Dynasty VR and have a little story to go along with it, then I'd recommend Adventure mode, but if you just want to go wild and do whatever you please then Sandbox might be more your speed. Though Sandbox feels a little less fleshed out without the quest system to give the world of Green Valley more context and character.

Medieval Dynasty New Settlement Looks Great

Speaking of character, this game looks really fantastic on the Meta Quest 3. With the usual limitations given by the hardware of a standalone headset, the team over at Spectral Games has done a great job of depicting the wilderness of Green Valley in the warmer seasons, and especially in Winter.

Look at that snow!

The landscape is dense with crafting resources to gather and animals to hunt. Not to mention the many secrets and treasures to dig up spread across the map. This VR game looks fantastic and is one of the best depictions of a natural environment seen so far on the Quest.

The sound is also great, with the chirping of birds, clanging of hammers, and animal calls all sounding crisp and greatly adding to the immersion to the wilderness around you as well as the physical actions you're doing.

The sound design does falter in a couple of places though. Especially at night. No matter what you're doing the usual relaxed ambient music is replaced by the same creepy, scary musical track. Nighttime isn't that dangerous, and so this choice to make it always sound like it is was certainly a weird one.

Even a satisfyingly productive late night at the forge is ruined when you've got this ominous music constantly playing in your ears. I'd often go to sleep just to not have to listen to it anymore.

The sounds for people also aren't very good. A lot of the villagers sound weirdly depressed when you're saying goodbye despite that voice line not matching their character in the quest text. Also, some lone bandits will yell a victory cry while sounding like three bandits at once before running away. This is probably a bug though.

This Is A Very Buggy Game At Release

Medieval Dynasty New Settlement was released with a lot of bugs and inconsistencies. Like how its entries in the in game encyclopedia are sometimes wrong, like this one stating that copper can't be mined with a stone pickaxe... though it actually can, or a child butt sliding across the floor instead of walking.

I couldn’t get around this bug, so I never finished Adventure mode in Medieval Dynasty VR

One hotfix is already in place, and hopefully, more fixes and support will be given to this game going forward, but the release version has a rushed and unfinished feeling. Like the entrance to a mine clearly just being a door in front of a wall of rock. I could give a lot of examples of this, but if you're playing this game soon after the publication of this article expect some jankiness and issues.

The biggest problem I ran into actually cut my Adventure mode playthrough short when I was getting close to the end. Darkness consumed my world despite the lit torch in my hand. Trying different torches didn't help, nor did reloading a save. I couldn’t see… forever.

I definitely didn't want to redo all of those hours of fetch quests to reach the end. Luckily this at least freed me from the burden of carrying around all those quest items that were no longer relevant but were taking up inventory slots because the game refused to let me drop them. Hopefully, these issues will be fixed in time, and if you're seeing this article far in the future they hopefully already have.

Medieval Dynasty VR Is Great At Gathering, Building, Crafting, and Not Much Else

Let's talk more about how this game actually plays. Most of what you do in Medieval Dynasty VR is gather resources and make things out of those resources. There's even money you can sell goods for, but you can't buy too many things, and mostly money is for paying your workers and paying your taxes.

Buying pigs at the local market

It would be nice to have been able to buy fertilizer for a farm without having to make your own pigpen just to get some, while seeds are purchasable because you can't make them yourself.

So the economy is barebones, and so are the NPCs. Without a quest they just bark one of the same few lines of dialog at you and wander around, or are either hireable workers or romanceable women with little personality.

Where Medieval Dynasty New Settlement really shines is its many different kinds of crafting. Each crafting station has its own systems for making things physically with your VR hands. If you want to make some stew to keep you fed for the day you select your recipe, chop up your ingredients, throw them in the pot, light the fire under it, and stir to completion before dipping a bowl in and eating up.

Soup will easily feed you forever in this VR “survival” game

Though it is odd that stew left in the pot disappears after you sleep, while stew in bowls does not. There are a lot of weird little quirks to this game just like that.

The crafting is generally great though, and is the strongest part of this game. Making pots involves molding clay on a potter's wheel with your hands, and making tools in the smithy involves its own system of heating up ingots, beating them into shape, and adding a handle.

Gathering resources involves a lot of physically chopping down trees and physically swinging your pick at rocks in dark caves. You can also physically pick up resources off of the ground, and you will need to do that a lot.

Magically vacuuming up reeds is something you’ll have to do a lot

The world of Medieval Dynasty VR is held together with Reeds. So many things need Reeds. The world would collapse without them. The same goes for various sizes of sticks. Luckily you can easily pick up these items quickly whenever you see them by pointing at them and pressing the trigger, which transfers them to your inventory.

Does this lack immersion? Sure, but you can still physically grab them and put them away in your backpack if you like.

Mining in a Dark Cave in Medieval Dynasty New Settlement… see how this stone pick can mine copper?

Building crafting stations and then crafting things with those stations is a very relaxing experience, and also the most fun part of this game. The satisfaction of making something from nothing with your hands is where Medieval Dynasty New Settlement really shines. You can even hire workers to gather materials for you so that you can focus on more crafting and more journeying.

Though it's in the more adventurous elements that this VR survival game doesn't shine nearly as much. While being billed as a survival title, the survival elements are entirely optional.

Keeping yourself watered and fed isn't much of a problem. A pot full of mushroom stew will last you at least two days, and you can make those very early on in the game. You'll need some water every day too... but wells and streams are everywhere. Keeping your bars full isn't ever as much of a challenge as it is in other games like Green Hell VR.

So does the combat add a fun survival challenge? Not really. It's very easy. I quickly discovered that just poking enemies with your spear while backing away works against basically anything. If you're hurt because your finger slipped off the thumbstick just eat a bunch of your plentiful food and you'll quickly feel better. The combat is laughably simple and clearly an afterthought. To be interesting it would need to be redone from the ground up.

Bandits aren’t much of a threat in this VR game, really no enemies are

Hunting intersects with this and is also where the gathering part of the game is at its weakest. Arrows simply would not register as hits half of the time, even when they clearly were. The animals are frightfully stupid and not a challenge to simply chase down with a spear, so why bother attacking them from a distance? Either way just skinning more aggressive varieties of critters like wolves, bears, and boars left me with plenty of leather and food.

There are some neat mysteries to explore and discover in the Green Valley, though some centered around finding hidden treasure chests spread across the map, and to be honest I don't find scouring every inch of such a large map for mounds of dirt to be very compelling. Maybe it would be to you, but I've walked these roads quite a lot and I think I've walked them enough.

My Sandbox playthrough of Medieval Dynasty New Settlement ended when I realized that I'd built all of the production buildings I could want, hired some workers, and now had a pretty self-sufficient setup going.

Then I wondered... what now? I'd done the virtual work, fun as it was, and created a little estate for myself out of nothing. Now I would use those resources to... make it bigger? Why? Maybe I quit too early before any more intriguing challenges came up, but I didn't see Medieval Dynasty VR giving a satisfying endgame now that I was a successful farmer and local craftsman.

There was possibly the aforementioned exploration to try and some secrets to still uncover, sure, but the lack of compelling survival mechanics or combat to complicate exploration made that feel like a chore.

Wolves aren’t much of a threat either, but give you lots of leather and meat

There were repeatable quests scattered around to get more reputation and money, but I had enough of those things already. Outside of technical and polish issues that's where Medieval Dynasty New Settlement is most disappointing. Once your dynasty is set and you've built yourself up, there's nowhere to go from there.

Maybe the quests in Adventure mode might have given a more satisfying resolution, but there's no way I’m going to rebuild from scratch a third time and do all those fetch quests again to find out. Maybe if Medieval Dynasty VR had multiplayer that would extend the fun as well, and Spectral Games has announced plans to introduce a Coop mode on their roadmap, which also includes bug fixes.

Getting to this point involved many pleasurable hours in this game, and I got a lot more entertainment out of Medieval Dynasty VR than I get out of most VR games. So if you want to build a medieval settlement of your own, and gather and craft your way to the pinnacle of success, I'd recommend Medieval Dynasty New Settlement, despite the higher than usual asking price of thirty dollars on the Meta Quest store.

If you want a survival or combat focused experience, look elsewhere, but if you love VR gathering and crafting this is the game for you. As long as you don't mind a bit of jank that is.

If you’ve tried Medieval Dynasty VR, let me know in the comments, do you agree that the crafting is good and the survival and combat is bad? What do you think about the endgame of Medieval Dynasty New Settlement?

Planing wood to make planks, one of the many great kinds of crafting in this game.

As always enjoy yourself out there in Virtual Reality, this has been Reality Remake.