It's basically a puzzler with RTS/Citybuilding elements. And an AI so incredibly stupid, you can place a quarry directly next to stone resources and the worker will fail to find it.
All I can say is the older Funatics games were better than this title. Cultures, Cultures 2, and 8th Wonder of the Wold (Funatics lost rights to use the name Cultures) were more fun in many ways. This game is little more than plunk a building down and trust it gets built. I have yet to locate a way to tell your workers to gather, or take up residence as a fisherman, or woodsman. While the original Cultures as quite tedious (babysitting your people to make sure they did not starve), it still was more fun. At $4.99 it is not a bad buy, but if you want more direct control try one of the older Cultures titles.
Interface is clunky. For some reason they chose to present everything in such a way that everything is always occluded by other stuff. Camera control is obnoxious. Goals are consistently unclear. Almost nothing is explained, very little is intuitive. I spent much of my first hours on my phone looking shit up instead of playing. And I kept coming across forums telling me the solution to my problem was a building that the game doesn't let you have in the beginning, making the early game fundamentally broken as you struggle to figure out what magic thing they expect you to do to fix something, even though you can't do it yet.
The lack of documentation on production amounts and the needs of your vikings almost made me give up and quit too soon. A stubborn part of me held on a while longer, trying more strategy, and I got through it. I still haven't worked out just how much food to produce, but stoped starving all the time. I actually am enjoying this though.
A few technologies unlock after the first couple islands which make it smoother. I don't know why you don't get the kitchen at the start of the game, too high tech, I guess.
It seems well worth the $1.49 sale price I payed for it after two play sessions.
I find this game pretty laughable as a city builder because it seems to think that every building has the same criterias, so a fishing hut in the middle of a land area is more effective than one near the coast?
I assume this anyways, because the game told me that you should put buildings in a green area to make it the best, and all buildings share the same placement areas, meaning that yes, your wood cutter and your fishing hut has to fight over the same spots.
I am not sure who this game was meant to attract, but it's certainly not a good game.