Collecting My Thought on Northgard—Deadly but Silent

Northgard is a strategy game that sees the player expand Viking influence over the newly discovered eponymous continent. Real-time strategy is a genre I am least familiar with, with the most comparable game I have played to this one being the resource management Prison Architect. This is perhaps why I found the onboarding process frustrating. Despite eventually being able to see the attempt to ease the player in, I found the learning curve to have started too steep, too soon. Many pivotal things were left unfairly unexplained, like sources of unhappiness in the population (even by the end of the game!). This was not an issue with Prison Architect, so could it be more than just my inexperience to blame? Nevertheless, I chugged through. And let me tell you, when this snowball gets rolling, it rolls deadly.

The game begins with Rig witnessing the death of his father, the High King Hargurorf, at the hands of a bad, bad man, Hagen. As if that weren't enough, Hagen decides to also steal their precious family heirloom, the Regal Horn Gjallarhorn. Golly! Naturally, Rig vows vengeance; and along his journey of bloodlust through Northgard, he encounters ally and enemy clans that gradually reveal more about the true reasons behind the murder of his father. The story was quite engaging, going through a series of fun twists and turns. The cinematics between levels were nicely written and well-delivered, though those within the levels were dry and unfaithful. It was as if these segments were written by someone of an astonishingly different calibre and style. What made it worse was that they were silent! I believe Shiro Games missed out big time by not having the intra-level dialogue voiced as well. As for gameplay, I respected how the different clans' personalities came through in how they played. The wolf clan is ruthless and mobile while the goat clan is hardy and productive. The core systems and the interaction of resources always shone through despite the wide variety of chapters and victory conditions on offer. The chapters themselves represented the arc of the story appropriately.

It is clear plenty of work went into creating a balanced gameplay experience for the player. I just wish more was put in to show its characters in a better light. It could also use quite a bit more polish on the QA side and a slight smoothing of the difficulty curve (chapter 3 was a Sisyphean nightmare). Saying that, the music is a bop and the game can be quite picturesque—my favourite parts were the transitions between seasons. At the end of the day, Northgard is something the team of 20- or 30-odd at Shiro Games should be proud of. Perhaps because of it, I may make the time to get more acquainted with other real-time strategy games.

#CutestCritter The bouncy sheep that provide warmth in winter via wool but can be fiddly to direct, so you just end up slaughtering them for 80 meat. Kinda cute though.

#WeirdestSound Gjallarhorn sounds like if the Lord of the Flies conch were a chain smoker.

#FavouriteLevel Chapter 5: Punitive Expedition. This level was intelligently designed to show off the wolf clan's very different style of play from the others' we encountered by that point.

#ReminiscentOf Game of Thrones (TV show). The parallels are stark!