I always wanted to be a sect leader. My ego would gladly take it, and Eastern Era promised me just that. Ancient China, Wuxia atmosphere, survival and development of subjects, building your own little martial utopia with a bunch of people who call me Master. What's not to love about it?
I really wanted to like this game. Like, really. I gave her more chances than I should have and probably more patience than she deserved. And the worst thing is that underneath all the problems there really is an interesting game.
The Chinese studio FunYoo Games is behind the game and you can see that they are really trying to sell that Wuxia atmosphere through the structure, aesthetics and the very idea of a sect trying to rise from the ashes to become a relevant force again. The only problem is that they let her out too early. Too soon.
Sect from the Ashes, RimWorld with kung fu
I admit, the setting is interesting. Ancient China in all its glory. You are in the role of a young leader in the making whose sect was literally trampled by someone, and with a few survivors you escape and try to rebuild something of your own. From that moment on, the game lets you create a new base, a new hierarchy, and a new opportunity to one day be someone and something again in the world of martial arts schools, conflicts, and ambition.
The game draws dangerously on Rimworld. You have to use natural resources, chop wood, mine stones, hunt animals or tame them, but with that specific Wuxia jir. Your students are not just ordinary workers: they must train regularly to strengthen their Qi. Each of them has its own characteristics, virtues and flaws, its own inventory and wishes that keep popping up.
As time passes, your little sanctuary expands, there are more people, the sect grows, and with it grows the feeling that you are building something really ambitious in front of you. When everything clicks, Eastern Era can really be fun. The feeling of building not only a base but your own little martial order is really cool. Unfortunately, it rarely clicks.
Launch that should have waited a little longer
I played the game about a week before release, and the first thing that greeted me was the almost complete lack of sound. I played some Chinese YouTube soundtrack on the side and continued playing. I said, well, maybe they'll iron it out. And indeed they are. A day after the launch problem, the developers publicly apologized and very quickly patched the no-sound bug, even promising free DLC as compensation. That is correct and they should be recognized for at least reacting quickly.
Only the sound was not the only problem.
The biggest problem of the Eastern Era is not the idea, but the execution. The game is still full of bugs, and what hurts the most is that its mechanics depend on the AI and work priorities working properly. And they often don't work. You don't order your students directly, but mostly through a priority system and menu, so it should work like in other colony sims: you set the priorities, they do the work reasonably. In theory.
In practice, I regularly watched my people ignore what I gave them, starve when food was literally steps away from them, sleep on the floor even though the bed was right next to it, or behave as if they had all collectively decided to form a sect of passive aggression. Every day after the release, the developers released hotfixes for AI behavior, priorities, quest bugs and similar problems, which clearly shows that the launch build was too raw.
Technical breakdown
The biggest moment of disappointment for me was when I realized that after ten hours I could no longer progress normally. Every time I opened the tech tree the game would freeze and the only real master I could call was the Task Manager.
It actively killed my motivation. I would like to say that I built an impressive empire, erected palaces and trained generations of students, but the reality is much more modest. I have a few poor houses and the feeling that I invested hours into something that was not ready to be released yet.
Graphically, Eastern Era can look very nice, especially when you zoom in. That old Chinese vibe, architecture, environment and details really have charm. When the camera sits properly and everything works, you feel the atmosphere of a world that wanted to be something special, and not just another impersonal survival sandbox.
However, the game is unoptimized, the graphics settings don't save as I adjust them, and until I somehow managed to get DLSS to work normally, I watched the shadows twitch. And the soundtrack, when it finally appeared, didn't really improve the impression as much as I had hoped. Too often it seems like the same thing is playing over and over again, instead of the music really building the atmosphere of the world.
UI from hell
The user interface is clumsy and confusing. This is especially frustrating because Eastern Era by nature already requires a lot of managerial clicking, monitoring and planning. When you add to that a UI that doesn't help you, but rather slows you down, you get the feeling that every serious task takes you two steps longer than it should. It also doesn't help that part of the text has obviously gone through auto-translate hell, and some is left half-translated or completely untranslated, so you have quests written in Chinese.
The worst thing about Eastern Era isn't that it's a bad game, it's that it's not bad. At least not in the core. It has an identity, it has a good setting, it has a very catchy basic loop and potential that can easily draw you in. When things are going well, it's easy to find yourself planning the next building, the next training session, and wondering what your sect will be like in another ten hours.
Conclusion
Currently this is a title with good ideas, a nice visual identity and a very attractive concept, but also with too many bugs, too much friction and too many moments where you wonder why it wasn't already fixed before release. The developers are obviously patching quickly and not shying away from apologizing, which is commendable, but that doesn't change the fact that the game was released too early.
Unfortunately, I cannot recommend it in this condition. Not because there is nothing valuable in her, but quite the opposite: because it can be seen that she could have been much better if she had been given a little more time. Maybe in a month or so they will patch it up to the level where it will really shine. But that's a problem for the future. There are too many better and more reliable games of this type out there right now for me to safely tell you to jump right in.
A copy of the PC version for review purposes was provided by the development studio FunYoo Games
