Medieval Machines Builder Preview

It’s not often a game unlocks a core memory, but I have a dim and distant recollection of building a catapult out of lolly sticks in school and shooting a ball of paper across a classroom.

Medieval Machines Builder is a physics sandbox game that has you gathering raw materials for, making the parts of, building, and using medieval siege engines on poor innocent fortifications and villages in much the same way, but with fewer balls of paper bouncing off the head of a nine-year-old.

As you work your way through the tutorial and the campaign map there’s a variety of fun ways of breaking stuff that include such toys as the ballista, the trebuchet, and the trusty catapult.


Of course, it’s not all fun and throwing stuff, you’ve got to build your shiny new toy! You’ll start chopping down trees and stripping off bark to make beams. From there, it’s giant medieval Mecano using ropes, beams, metal plates, pins, nails, and such to make your machine of destruction and either fire bolts or throw rocks. You’ll make all the individual parts and upgrade your tools to make it easier, but it can sometimes be challenging to work out which bit goes where and how to get to it (looking at you, trebuchet).



It’s still in Early Access over on Steam but has come quite some way since it hit on the 19th of February, so head on over and check it out, few things are as atavistically pleasing as chucking a hoofing great rock at a castle and seeing the walls fall.

It’s just a shame there are no French knights on the top of the walls.