Northgard Review

The RTS genre has a wide variety of control forms. There is control of land, valuable mines, fields of resources, control points, and regions. The last ones are a rarity. Only Spellforce 3 uses the mechanics of region control among recent RTS games. Another game that uses this form of control efficiently is Northgard. Northgard is a combination of simple RTS, survival game, and elementary economic simulator.

Legends and fairytales are alive on the shores of Northgard: alive draugrs, fallen valkyries, giants-jotuns, ancient monsters, and Eternal Winter. Still, mythic creatures are one of many perils of the hostile world.

Northgard Review: Gameplay

Shortly, Northgard’s gameplays is an endless chain of compromises and sacrifices. You try not to let a deficit appear in any of the resource fields, or the whole colony will die. For example, if you built the first cutter’s hut, and directed two settlers to it, then there will be nobody to gather food. Therefore, pick your choices carefully.

When you think that you have mastered all the production chains, you notice that your people are not too happy with their lives in the settlement. Then you should build a brewery and place a medicine man here. Now your people are happy, but you have a lack of gold. And when colonization slows down, due to the bigger and bigger necessity in food, there will be a deficit of place. So you run between the regions, trying to cover a giant with a small blanket.

Despite the small number of variables, Northgard manages to create a complex scheme out of them. The conflicts are inevitable, and the crumbling mechanism of the colony passes a test of strength. For example, Anno lacked such stress tests, where production chains are much more complex, but there are no threats for your economy. At the same time, Northgard has a lot of crises to stress you. Northgard strategy resembles Banished, where your settlement was at the edge of the disaster also.

In general, Northgard does not suffocate you all the time. It is possible to maintain prosperity during the harshest challenges. When you learn all ins and outs of the gameplay mechanics, you will be able to challenge yourself with more satisfying victories than building a few shacks and trying to keep them alive as long as possible. The developers, Shiro Games, may not be artists, but they are persistent craftsmen. The game receives updates and patches regularly, reaching an almost perfect balance. Besides the major platforms, the Northgard switch version pleases with stability and decent performance.

Northgard Review: Singleplayer

Besides the multiplayer, which we will discuss later, Northgard has a single-player campaign. This mode shows distinctly how limited Shiro Games is. The artwork is rough, meager lines of the text, voiceless dialogues, and at the top of it – a boring story. The protagonist lost his father, who used to be a king, and chased the killer to the new continent, Northgard. However, the story is not that simple; the killer has a more powerful patron that tries to bring Ragnarok closer.

The characters lack depth; their dialogues are shallow and written poorly.

However, Northgard strategy manages to surprise you closer to the final. Without spoilers, you will be afraid not the beginning of the winter but its end.

Still, RTS is a genre that does not require strong stories. It is more than enough to have a decent reason to go forward. Campaign missions shall be unique and variable to keep players engaged. And Northgard, partially, gives such variability. Tasks are various: in one mission, you need to protect your ally, another presents you a race for glory. And then you need to build a sturdy defense in four years before forces of darkness come. The main issue is that the game does not vary standard schemes of development and don’t shift their order. Each time you will have to build production chains, breweries, and trading posts, hire an army, and capture neighbor regions. The main difficulty is in the simplified conditions of failure. For example, it is extremely difficult to beat your opponent in the race for glory because he gains it from thin air. If you do not catch up, then you have chosen the wrong vector of development. And no loading will help you, only restart of the level. Northgard does not know limits: if you need to accomplish something, it should be done despite everything. Otherwise, you need to cheat to beat the game, like in one of the last missions. It requires special ore that is guarded by an invincible snake. The game supposed that you would fight the beast, but the most optimal way to beat this mission is to colonize every region with the ore. I assume that it is not what developers intended for this mission.

Northgard Review: Multiplayer game

In the end, the main focus of the game is multiplayer. Only in this mode, the game allows you to choose a clan. There are a few of the clans, and their bonuses change strategy drastically, as well as the way to victory. The terms of winning is another element of TBS games in Northgard. You may conquer all of your foes, collect 1200 glory, gain the most powerful blessing of the gods (analog of a science victory), have a pile of gold, or complete a special task unique for each map. For example, you will need to capture the Yggdrasil tree, forge the sword of Odin, or something like that.

Partially, your victory in Northgard strategy depends on starting conditions: if you do not have runic stones, then the highest blessing will be a tough call. The glory victory is not easy also. If you lose one of the dozen regions you are to control, you will lose the race for glory. Finally, your clan dictates the conditions of victory. For example, the clan of Raven is perfect for diversions and trading victory. At the same time, the clan of Wolf cannot expect any other victory than a military one. The clan has bonuses for happiness for each warrior, and each wolf killed for food.

The deficit problem described earlier is doubly relevant because you need to hurry. There is no obligation to fight with your neighbors, but sooner or later, the war will start. Each strategy via the Net, no matter how peaceful it is, will end in war. Therefore, you have to manage the micro-control of your army. You cannot underestimate the price of each soldier, and they matter not only the money cost. New settlers appear slowly. While you are building up your army from scratch, the enemy will devastate your territory. And the lower happiness, the lesser is settlers’ growth. Therefore, destroying the frontier regions may stop the settler’s inflow. It means that each soldier should be cherished and kept safe to avoid death. And this is a tough challenge with Northgard’s controls. There are no commands except “attack this region” or “attack this enemy.” The combination of Ctrl+LMB does not work in a usual way, and picking soldiers from the crowd is painful. The game recommends protecting your army but does not give any tools for that. Northgard switch version suffers from the uncomfortable controls too.

However, a combination of TBS and RTS elements solve the main issue of the global strategies – unsuitability for the Net games. At the same time, a match in Northgard may last for a couple of hours but not dozens, as in your favorite TBS strategy. Moreover, the game allows you to defeat your enemies strategically instead of the usual tactical approach. And the single-player campaign teaches you this way to victory, even with some balance problems.

Northgard Review: Conclusion

Sadly, Northgard did not play around with the setting. The game lacks music, and the present compositions barely contribute to the atmosphere. Visually, Northgard resembles Albion Online – chopped and poorly painted landscapes and figures. Still, the Northgard switch version manages to look good on a small screen. I would like to compare the game with Thea: The Awakening. Thea was made on a tight budget, but it manages to submerge players into Slavic, pagan mythology. However, the atmosphere does not matter much in the Net games: you worry more about covering your rearward and building a thick defense to protect peasants from draugrs.