The Guild: Europa 1410 Preview
Gamers with an interest in strategy and sim games will probably be familiar with The Guild franchise. The series reaches all the way back to 2002 with Europa 1400: The Guild. Subsequent games had varying degrees of success, and now developer Ashborne Games has rebooted the series with The Guild: Europa 1410. The title isn’t much of a stretch, but the game’s design is a bit more innovative.
Kings, Queens and Pawns
Although the new game has a familiar-looking isometric top-down perspective like a medieval city builder, that’s really not the genre. Nor is The Guild: Europa 1410, strictly speaking, a medieval life simulator or a military-focused strategy game. Although it contains elements of all these game types, The Guild: Europa 1410 is essentially about wealth, power, and carrying one’s influence (and DNA) forward through time, not unlike the prior entries.
In The Guild 3, you controlled a character in third person and guided them around the city, doing medieval tasks, growing your business and family, and slowly becoming more comfortable and influential. The Guild: Europa 1410 removes the direct control of a character and uses the isometric town as a living backdrop. You can watch as your decisions and actions play out, but most of those decisions are made via menus and static illustrations. It’s a bit like the offspring of Crusader Kings and The Guild 3.
If You Love Spreadsheets and Menus, I Have a Game For You
You start The Guild: Europa 1410 as a simple medieval character, pick a gender and profession, and start gathering the elements of work and daily life. Say you’re a smith, well then, you need to arrange for raw materials to be brought to your workshop. You need clients and carts to deliver your goods. At some point, you’ll need to hire additional workers, and you’ll need to negotiate political and social alliances. The town and kingdom keep changing. Sometimes you’re an agent of change, sometimes you just react.
Since a major goal of your life in The Guild: Europa 1410 is carrying on your name and wealth, you need a spouse and heirs. At the start, you have a catalogue of potential life partners, each with positives and negatives. You choose how to court them. God willing, you eventually have a brood of children, and you can pick their professions and decide which ones will inherit your wealth. At some point in your journey, you can elect to become a town politician, helping to pass laws that possibly help your business or negatively impact others. You can be a town father or something akin to a medieval Godfather. There’s plenty of crime.
Even in the demo I played, it’s clear that there’s a lot going on in The Guild: Europa 1410. I barely scratched the surface of understanding the game’s systems. While there are tool tips and helpful pop-ups, the game can easily feel overwhelming right out of the gate, something that the opening screens acknowledge. The Guild: Europa 1410 is in desperate need of an actual tutorial.
Unreal Shine
It’s probably inevitable that a game as dense as The Guild: Europa 1410 will have a UI to match, and that’s certainly the case. There are menus and pop-ups and stats and choices with every click of the mouse. The isometric map starts with a flood of intimidating icons. A few games in and the flow of gameplay becomes a little clearer.
The Guild: Europa 1410 is built with Unreal Engine 5, but I’m guessing few will notice. So much time is spent in menus with pretty basic static images that the game’s impressive town design is a low priority. There are a lot of necessary audio alerts from your workers and townspeople and even in the demo, they got a bit repetitive.
The Guild 3 drew a lot of criticism for technical issues and missing features. I can’t judge the overall state of The Guild: Europa 1410, but it’s definitely a different take on the franchise’s core mission. Fans of deep strategy, multi-layered simulations, and political and economic machinations should check out The Guild: Europa 1410 coming to Early Access in July.
***PC code provided by the publisher for preview***
