Northgard

Northgard gives much reasons to like it. Good music and pretty graphics makes building and managing your clan a pleasant experience. Campaign is rather short, but that's enough to meet all basic clans and learn the ropes. Map is divided into tiles hosting various type of resources or special objects that you need to colonise and manage while your clan grows. Add Nordic mythology to the mix and you get a good mix of citybuilding with RTS strategy game in a fantasy setting. Ok so why just 1 star? Because of conquest mode. It is supposed to be a challenge, and the concept itself is great - challenging maps with special rules and win conditions, after every vicotry you get to keep a bonus that's definite boost to your clan. Oh, and you get a cool skin for your clan's town hall if you can beat it with that clan. The problem is - AI is not more challenging by being smarter, but by cheating. And I mean heavily cheating, to the point it's not playing the same game as you. AI doesn't suffer the penalties from negative events that slow you down. AI can get resources to develop freely even when they're scarce or unaviable on the map. The same AI player can spam you three warbands of 5 men three times in a row giving you no time to heal your own warriors. Finally AI forms alliances against you (I've seen warriors of two different colours standing passively next to each other, while being hostile against me). And while AI unites against you it coordinates even though they didn't scout your area so shouldn't be able to see your warband's movement. Winning is possible, but it's tedious, frustrating, not satisfying and definitely not fun. So if you're fine with sticking to short but nice campaign, don't mind playing random maps against stupid AI over and over, or want to try multiplayer games - Northgard will provide you woth lot of good fun. But if you'd like trying yourself in a challenge, spare yourself the nerves and look for some other game.

The game is mostly a simplified Settlers with Viking theme. You're commanding a group of Vikings, building structures such as farms and woodcutters' huts, training camps for army, etc. There's no need to worry about production chains - all resources (food, wood, stone etc.) are stored in a global pool. As a real-time strategy, game tempo is faster than Settlers but slower than StarCraft. I really wish there was way to pause the game while moving the camera and checking things at least. Sometimes it feels there's too much going on and no time to react, sometimes it feels like nothing is happening for 10 minutes. Art style is cute, a bit cartoony.

I have read a lot of review comparing this game to settlers & age of empires. Settlers: Similarity: cute villager doing their job, map divided in regions, villager task Different: no complex economy (no ressource transformation), no logistics (common ressource pool) Age of empires: Similarity: send your villagers collect food & wood, and later stone & metal, build buildings, assign worker, different clans with common basis and slight or big differences on specific points Different: few units types and small armies, building limits. Actually, nobody explained that he emphasis of this game is building & worker placement, like in several board games. You have a limited amount of building slot per region, and some regions have specific ressources (stone, fish, ...), you need to expand to get new regions for new buildings. You also have a certain amount of worker available at some point, and you can re-assign them to task according to your current need: You have too much wood? let's convert your woodcutter into miner or warrior. In addition to this, you have some ressources (food, happiness, ...) which are critical for the stability of your village, and some other which helps to improve (metal, science...). In the case you under-evaluated your needs, or some event happens, you can be short on a vital ressources, and all your economy crash down: did not plan enough food for winter => people are unhappy and less productive, and could also hunger and are even less productive or die. No hardcore survival game here, but it happens sometimes and it is fun. Oh, the winter, an interesting game feature. Few strategy games included interesting cycle management (day/night by warcraft 3 meh). Here you have once a year (12 minutes) 3 month of winter in which your consumption of food and wood increase drastically, and your army attack capacity drop down. Last point, the games are usually 45-75 minutes, but you do not feel under time pressure for micro management or whatever.

+ Cute graphics + Simple, yet fun research tree + Story is bland but okay - TOO MANY SYSTEMS that only exist to screw you over. Sectors (like in Z or Dawn of War, but unfun), max buildings per sector, max workers per building, max soldiers, etc. Instead of exploring, fighting, researching, and enjoying the game, you're busy trying to navigate 100 pitfalls and rules and limitations that are so arbitrary and mechanical they completely destroy any kind of immersion or fun this world might have created. For example: only basic villagers can build or repair. So when a building is on fire or needs building fast you will have to find a villager to do the job even though the place is crawling with other followers. And if you dont have any villagers, you'll have to find other people and manually send them to a certain building to convert them back to villagers, then give them new orders. - CAMPAIGN is stressful. The game constantly throws disasters at you that have little to do with the story. - FOLLOWERS: Very hard to tell what job each follower has. Your minions are so tiny and the map is so cluttered it's impossible to tell a villager from a hunter or healer like in a Blizzard RTS. Game has a decent list of all followers in the bottom right corner, but you should be able to find followers just looking at the world. - MAP: Once you scout 5+ sectors, things get overwhelming. Things like stone, iron and treasures can be hard to see so the safest way is to click on a sector and read a summary in the UI. Again: this should be available looking at the world. - HEROES: Top review mentioned the heroes were "like in Warcraft 3". What!? They have NO voice lines, personality, recognizable visuals, level ups, items or skills! - A.I. is not terrible like in some games, but villagers will still idle sometimes even though they're supposed to collect food when idle. Healers will refuse to heal or cure deseases and you'll have no idea why. - STORY cutscenes do not pause the game. WTF?

Greate before the march patch. No more crossplay with steam, 2 weeks and problem not fixed