Enjoyable rogue-like game reminscient of FTL and a minimalist tile-based strategy game. Although the game feels minimalistic, there is extraordinary depth with regards to the tactics you employ and the unit compositions you bring to the battle based on the terrain presented. Overall, great gameplay.
If you're an RTT fan, buy it. If not, wait for a sale.
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[Story]
☐ Shakespeare
☐ Lovely
☐ Average
☐ Some lore
☑ No story
All the story is on the store page. Vikings are attacking your kingdom's islands and you have to go to each island to defend them.
[Gameplay]
☐ Excellent
☑ Good
☐ Average
☐ Meh
☐ Boring
Control up to 4 squads per RNG island RTT-style. You specialize each squad in 1 of 3 class, active skills, and assign 1 item. Can also slow down time at any point by holding down the spacebar. Each playthrough has 10 commanders in total. If your commander dies, they're permanently dead if you've disabled restarts. If you fail, you restart your playthrough with permanent traits and items you've gained from past playthroughs.
The lack of classes, skills, and items hurt its replayability, so it does get repetitive after 2-3 hours.
[Difficulty]
☐ Dark Souls
☐ Difficult
☑ Average
☐ Easy
☐ Click to win
If you play with restarts, it's manageable since you can always restart when your commanders die. If not, then it becomes very difficult since losing your heavily-invested squads is pretty much game over. Game slowly ramps up difficulty. Also, 2 initial difficulty settings. Can unlock Very Hard after a hard campaign.
[Grind]
☐ None
☑ Optional
☐ Average
☐ Too much
☐ Torture
Only for the 15k kills achievement or if you want to 100% the game with permanently gained traits and items.
[Graphics]
☐ Reality-like
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
[Audio]
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
[PC Requirements]
☑ Cardboard
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
[Bugs]
☑ None
☐ Minor
☐ Can get annoying
☐ CP2077
☐ Big Rigs
[Game Time]
☐ End of time
☐ Long
☐ Average
☑ Short
☐ Coffee break
Each mission is about 5-15 mins long. Most will take 8-10 hours to complete a playthrough. ~22 hours to complete all the achievements.
[Price]
☐ Free!
☑ Worth it
☑ On sale
☐ Deep discount
☐ Don't consider
If you're an RTT fan, buy it. If not, wait for a sale.
You know how some games are your absolute jam and you'll replay them endlessly? I don't get that here.
The art style is excellent. The island design is wonderful; as a tabletop gamer it gave me some cool ideas for making wilderness terrain.
It was a great experience for my first run through; I died early and restarted. Then on my second run I cleared every island perfectly, got every unit, got every artifact, beefed up the right mix of units with a focus on maxing out a set for the end island. And then the end fight ramped the difficulty up inexplicably high. Bewildering.
I'm hep to the neat little tricks like fending off big enemies with spears, and using the spear charge to spill enemies into the water, exploiting the AI to shift my forces, baiting arrows against a shield unit and hammering them with someone else, generally using each special ability to the utmost at the right time against the right target. I'm not playing the game wrong.
My problem is (1) I can't actually finish that end fight even though I had a perfect run, and (2) there doesn't seem to be any different content to see except slight variations on the islands.
I don't expect Hades-tier content on repeat play, but this doesn't feel like a commercial game. It feels like a really excellent grad school project. The skeleton is solid, but it just does not have enough juicy fat. I can see the designer following Saint-Exupery's maxim "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." The game is a neat little package, like a string of jewels.
It's just not worth playing twice.
That's just me though; like I said, you may find that this game is super engaging for you and you just can't stop replaying it. With all that in mind, if you get it for $5 it's a great bargain for the experience. If you get it for $9, you might feel like you overpaid.
There's just not enough to the actual gameplay to justify the price. For me It's too shallow. If you buy it, don't expect to be willling to play again. I hope the game improves in the future.
Would I recommend this game? Yes.
Would I buy it again? No
From the sounds of it, it seems simple and it is...kind of.
Throughout the game, you are given squads with a bit of a personality. These little vikings are lead by a main unit with his own portrait. Besides that and a few voice effects for the squads to distinguish them, that is all you get in terms of personality. As for the story and lore, there is none...well unless you made one up yourself. As you move along the map and reach each location, you arrive on small to large islands. Some of them having different terrain and weather which have slight affects on gameplay. However at no point do you come across any bit of lore or plot. Now, if that was the intention by the game's developers, Plausible Concept, to have no plot then I suppose they succeed in that regard. The lack of any kind of lore does hurt as this game would have benefit from it.
The art style is both cute and brutal at the same time. From the menus and all their interesting details to the designs of the units and environments, the team at Plausible Concept deserve top marks for that. The music itself is not so memorable but effective in some places. As you defend an island and are surround by all sides, listening to the eerie chants and drones is a nice touch of dread as you push back the horde.
In terms of game-play, it is where Bad North is at its best. The concept of defending the islands you visit from swarms of invaders and doing the whole process again until you reach the last island is exciting and hardly grows tiresome. Controlling each unit is simple enough but figuring out what each one works best for the given situation can take a while to get used to. All the skills and items are a blast to mess around with. However no matter how well equip you are for combat, it all goes down the drain with weak strategies.
After the Jotunn update, which fix a lot of bugs that I ran across with and added some nice content to boot, I am much more pleased with how it turned out.