Bellwright

Worth buying? What 300 Steam reviews say.Worth buying? Here’s what 300 Steam reviews actually say.

Very Positive · 80%Very Positive · 80%2024

$29.99

US Steam price, checked 2 h ago

The verdict

A deep, slow medieval settlement builder with Mount & Blade-style combat and Rimworld-style villager management. Skip it if you dislike grind, clunky combat or unreliable villager AI.

Great for

Patient players who like slow village building, production chains and co-op, and tolerate early-access jank

Main risk

Tedious grind and clunky combat, plus villager AI that ignores your priorities

What players love

Blend of survival, city building and army command

Mentioned in ~1 in 4 positive reviews

“Feels like 3-4 different games in one (The Forest, Rimworld, Mount and Blade).”
Steam review · 54.8 h played ↗

“You start with literally nothing — just your own hands — and over time you become the leader of a small country with multiple villages and outposts.”
Steam review · 185.5 h played ↗

Deep settlement and villager management

Mentioned in ~1 in 5 positive reviews

“The villager AI is surprisingly well done, you can specialize their tasks or leave it as is and let them decide what needs to be done in your settlement and they take care of it.”
Steam review · 22.9 h played ↗

“It's just so satisfying to watch all your settlers get to work once you've set them up properly.”
Steam review · 63.4 h played ↗

“village management is great, you can automate everything, even combat”
Steam review · 117 h played ↗

Addictive co-op and huge content

Mentioned in ~1 in 6 positive reviews

“The production chains and the sheer number of items to collect, craft and produce are immense, and that's exactly the sort of thing I love in a game.”
Steam review · 324.5 h played ↗

“The first weekend we had to play the game we played for 8 hours straight.”
Steam review · 22.7 h played ↗

Active developers and mod support

Mentioned in ~1 in 8 positive reviews

“Extremely active dev group that is constantly pushing out updates you can test for yourself on an open beta”
Steam review · 178.1 h played ↗

What players complain about

Clunky, weak combat

Mentioned in ~1 in 3 negative reviews

“Combat has got to be the worst I've ever seen in a game.”
Steam review · 10.8 h played ↗

“Melee combat is really bad: it is a "mount&blade" style of combat but feels very unresponsive”
Steam review · 45.7 h played ↗

“The combat mechanics are absolutely terrible.”
Steam review · 4.9 h played ↗

Grindy, slow progression

Mentioned in ~1 in 4 negative reviews

“Tedium simulator.”
Steam review · 25.5 h played ↗

“It takes too long to go up the tech tree.”
Steam review · 54.3 h played ↗

“This isn't a game, it's grind for the sake of grind.”
Steam review · translated · 7.3 h played ↗

Villager AI ignores priorities and gets stuck

Mentioned in ~1 in 4 negative reviews

“villagers completely ignore jobs pending for no reason”
Steam review · 52.2 h played ↗

“I liked the game until it became clear that settler management doesn't work.”
Steam review · translated · 14.8 h played ↗

Fetch-quest filler and AI voices

Mentioned in ~1 in 5 negative reviews

“It's basically just 80 fetch quests and terrible combat duct taped together.”
Steam review · 3.9 h played ↗

“AI voicing... Really? There's 0 immersion to it for that reason alone.”
Steam review · 0.6 h played ↗

Crashes, memory leaks and stutter

Mentioned in ~1 in 7 negative reviews

“CRASHES, CRASHES, CRASHES.”
Steam review · 36.4 h played ↗

“Game has huge problems with memory leaks which causes crashes.”
Steam review · 94.5 h played ↗

Tedious click-by-click building

Mentioned in ~1 in 10 negative reviews

“you have to nail in EVERY SINGLE BOARD, tie EVERY SINGLE knot”
Steam review · 203.4 h played ↗

“"click a circle, wait 3 seconds, repeat 500 times"”
Steam review · translated · 11.2 h played ↗

System requirements

From the Steam store page

Steam Deck: Unsupported

Minimum

OSWindows 10 / Windows 11

ProcessorIntel Core i5-8600 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600

Memory16 GB RAM

GraphicsNVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 8GB / AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB / Intel ARC A580 8GB

Storage24 GB available space

Recommended

OSWindows 10 / Windows 11

ProcessorIntel Core i5 13600 / AMD Ryzen 5 5600

Memory16 GB RAM

GraphicsNVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB / AMD Radeon RX 6600 8GB / Intel ARC A770 16GB

Storage24 GB available space

OSWindows 10 / Windows 11

ProcessorIntel Core i5-8600 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600

Memory16 GB RAM

GraphicsNVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 8GB / AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB / Intel ARC A580 8GB

Storage24 GB available space

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