Renown

About Renown

Renown is a medieval survival game developed by RDBK Studios that blends resource gathering, castle building, and competitive combat. Released on September 22, 2025, it’s available on PC. The game drops players into a procedurally generated world where they start with nothing, scavenge materials, construct bases, and engage in skill-based first-person fighting. Its core loop mixes base-building depth with fast-paced raids and territorial conflicts. The multiplayer focus means every match feels like a battle for dominance in a constantly shifting landscape. Think of it as a mix of survival crafting and arena brawling, with a heavy emphasis on strategic fortifications and PvP.

Gameplay

In Renown, you begin by chopping trees, mining rocks, and crafting basic tools to build shelter. The building system is intuitive but allows for complex designs, imagine starting with a wooden hut and eventually creating multi-tiered stone castles with moats and trapdoors. Combat is the star: it’s fast, responsive, and leans into precise parries, dodges, and counterattacks. Players can customize weapons and siege engines, then use them to raid others’ bases. Raids require planning, flanking guards, breaching walls, and targeting weak points. Multiplayer matches are intense, with players either defending their kingdoms or invading in teams. The cycle of building, upgrading, and being attacked creates a constant push-pull between construction and destruction.

What Players Think

Renown holds an 82% positive rating on Steam with 1,200 reviews. Community moods lean toward "Challenging" (34%) and "Satisfying" (28%), though "Frustrating" (19%) also appears. Average playtime is 35 hours, with 17% of players completing all 100 achievements (45 hours required). Early reviews praise the combat depth: “Raiding is the best part, every siege feels like a chess match.” Others critique the grind: “Building a decent base takes forever without loot drops.” The game’s 20% drop rate for high-tier materials adds a luck element some players dislike. Multiplayer lobbies often hit 12-16 players, and 60% of matches end in a single dominant player claiming the win.

PlayPile's Take

Renown is a niche pick for fans of survival-building hybrids and competitive combat. It’s free to play, with optional in-game purchases for cosmetic upgrades. The learning curve is steep, expect to spend 20+ hours just to feel competitive. If you enjoy careful base-building and high-skill PvP, it rewards persistence. But the slow progression and lack of solo story missions may frustrate casual players. It’s a solid, if polarizing, test of patience and strategy, ideal for those who thrive in games that demand both creativity and combat chops.

Storyline

Renown is a multiplayer survival experience set in a vast and ever-changing medieval world. Players begin with nothing, gather resources, build a kingdom and fight to survive in the hopes of becoming renowned across the land. At its core, Renown is a first-person medieval fighting game, with a strong emphasis on competitive skill-based combat. Renown takes the most enjoyable and popular aspects from contemporary open-world survival games which include Building, Progression and Social Politics. These are then combined with close quarters, skill-based combat to create an immersive and engaging multiplayer experience. The combat system functions with a set of easy to learn, hard to master fighting mechanics. The system is also built so that it is very easy to understand, allowing new players to easily learn the basics. As players become comfortable with the system, their developing level of skill becomes a major source of enjoyment. The building system uses an easy-to-understand and deploy method. This allows for greater depth when creating both small and large castle or village-type structures. From a small house with only a door, players expand into fully customized castles, creating structures truly unique to the person's ability and experience. The raiding system represents the pivotal activity that all types of players can undertake in-game. What’s the point in building a great castle if you can’t level someone else's to the ground. In a way the players are always in an “Arms Race” to see who can build the strongest, smartest, and most awe-inspiring structures. We want to provide you with just as awe-inspiring weapons, siege engines and all the utilities required for an ongoing medieval war.