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.
I've just completed my first playthrough and I have mixed feelings. After first two hour into the game I was absolutely amazed, seeing three different combat styles, reputations and karma system and moral choices in the first missions, I was expecting quite a complex game with deep storytelling. In general I do feel a bit dissapointed for those expectations wasn't exactly met, but still I've had a lot of fun following the story. To summarise my experience: Pros: + three combat styles to choose from, two of them can easily be maxed during one playthrough, all feeling equally fun to play, combat itself is not difficult to master + interesting crafting concentraiting on upgrading gear rather than making it from scratch + intersting story and lots of lore to find + good (mostly) companion stories, with interesting twist here and there (Scott, looking at you) + enemies' difficulty scale lategame Cons: - storytelling. It started out good, but the depth I was expecting after first hours wasn't there till the end, actually the closer to the grand finale the more shallow and rushed it felt. I do play for story, so I pay attention to dialogs and lore, but I've been confused more than once with what the quests offered. -backtracking. It was acceptable early, but the last act of the game is just running back and forth between the same people and places, killing the same groups of enemies over and over again, as they respawn fast, sometimes you run from A to B only for an NPC to tell you now you have to go back to A adn then come back to him... Sadly for me the horible backtracking, together with increasing shallowness, made me to rush to the end just to see the end of the story, skipping side quests and feeling more and more annoyed. Can't say the final boss felt in place. Overall though, if you can grab this game on a sale, don't hesitate, for the gameplay is fun and story itself is definitely worth experiencing!
