So many missed opportunites...
Sims Medieval is...okay. Watching my sims get into trouble and do silly things is still fun, even after all these years. The problem for me is that Sims Medieval doesn't really give me more than that. It teases you with the possibility of more but in the end doesn't deliver.
A simple example is combat. In Sims Medieval your hero sim may often find themselves in combat versus another sim. This can simply be a practice match or a much more serious fight to the death. Here we could have had a simple combat system that allowed the player to contribute and offered us hilarity as a reward. Instead we are just the "Watcher". We get no real say in the outcome, and that's just not as fun.
Here's another example - frequently we are given a quest to venture into the forest and fight a great boar or something. As a player I'd not only like to see this event, but be allowed some meaningful interaction. However what we usually get is a pop up box with a little text informing us of the outcome. Wheee....
And the game does this repeatedly for a variety of things. The most exciting events in Medieval seem to happen off screen out of view and we are only given a simple report of what happened afterwards.
When I bought this game I had hoped that there would be some elements of city management and building. For instance it would have been nice to have to do a quest to safe guard the resources for a building project, then manage the problems of the workers so they will build the structure, and then another quest in order to coax potential occupants to the town. It would have been nice to actually watch my people slowly gather resources and build their own homes, as well as structures I'd commissioned as their monarch. It would have been nice if my policies affected immigration. It would be nice to have the option to raise and lower tax rates, defend against invading neighbors, avoid peasant uprisings, and navigate the politics of the kingdoms various factions.
Medieval offers none of this. Not nice!
After each unrelated quest you gain a few building points. You click to spend the points and instantly you have a new wizards tower or something. Need a wizard for it? Easy, just click and choose the wizard you want to stock the tower. So there's virtually no direct connection between the substance of the quests and the growth of your town.
So in summary, this is a game that too me is really all about what its lacking.