izigame.me

This is a.... meh..... review.
It would honestly be a great review if it weren't for my two major complaints. Let's get into the good first though.
Northgard is a strategy game where in you need to expand your clan as quickly as possible, amassing the supplies you need to survive and grow. It took me a hot minute to realize but it seems the goal is not to conquer other areas and other clans so much as to gain more fame. I may be wrong in this regard though as in my 4 hours of game play I have not reached the end game. I've gotten close once.
The art style is lovely and so is the music.
The difficulty in gaining resources isn't too bad. Some resources SEEM scarce at first but you quickly realize there are a couple ways to gain things. Such as for food you have a few options. You can find an area with fertile land and build a farm, find an area with animals and make a hunting lodge, find a pond with fish and make a fishing hut, and you can even go a little bit without any of that as long as you keep a few of your people as villagers because they will auto gather food. You can gather wood from building a woodcutter in any area with trees, you don't HAVE to have a forest. It's just that the forests provide MORE wood. The true pressure in the game though is food, as food is how you colonize another area and you need to expand your area and how you feed your people. You need to expand your area rather quickly because once another clans boarders touch yours.... it becomes much more difficult to expand. Also fuck kobolds.
Overall it's a great game.... but it's held back by two things for me.
1) There is no proper tutorial that I can find. If you start in single player there are "hints" that tell you what you should do next, but it doesn't explain much of anything to you. I played through like 3 times before I finally figured out how the forge worked, that I could pick stats that made my clan more defensive or offensive, and that the markplace didn't just passively make money I had to set up trade routes. I still don't understand how rivalry's work and I haven't looked up a tutorial yet because I wanted to see if I could understand the game without one. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind when a game doesn't really hold your hand however... the lack of a tutorial is amplified by my second complaint.
2) You can't do anything when the game is paused. It's not just that you can't allocate resources, set up building, or set up people to move to a certain area. No, you can't even look at the game when paused. The screen becomes blurry when you pause. This means that I can't even click on a building and take a second to really figure out what a building DOES because if I stop playing long enough to really explore a buildings mechanics. To really sit and read what happens if I upgrade this building, read all the things the forge can do and make an informed decision, etc..... I'm going to be fucked because in that time everything can hit the fan because time progresses rather rapidly in this game. This is made worse for me personally as I have reading comprehension issues, meaning that I have to take a bit more time than the average person to really process what I'm reading. It's also a pretty common problem for a lot of people so I am far from the only person this could effect in this way.
Now. I understand that the game has multiplayer and I understand this being a feature in multiplayer, but there is no feasible reason why this is a thing in the single player campaign. I can even understand not being able to DO things while paused.... but to not even be able to survey my areas and buildings.... it honestly ruins the game because I can't take the time to at least understand what the fuck I'm doing.
I'm a huge fan of Frostpunk. It's a brutally hard game. Even that game has a DETAILED explaination of what every feature does and you can do things and survey things while paused. Even with that ability you can easily screw yourself and cause your own doom from not looking closely enough. Same with games like Oxygen Not Included. Both ONI and Frostpunk are difficult games! Having this feature does not make a game easier.... it just makes it more pleasant to play and allows you to truly grasp what you are doing. Admittedly even with the time to figure things out in ONI I still had to look things up to help me my first couple play throughs. Not because the game didn't explain things but because there were so many damn options to do things and it fried my brain. After a couple playthroughs though I grasped things pretty solidly.
When I fail in those games it has always been that I didn't properly solve a problem or foresee a coming issue. I didn't plan enough. That kind of thing. I'm frustrated with MYSELF, not the game. Compared to with Northgard.... where everytime I've failed it's been because I didn't understand what the hell I was doing and couldn't properly plan... because I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't understand the ramifications of my actions or how I could prevent certain problems.
What this feature, not allowing anything to be done during pause, does is artificially increase the difficulty of the game. The mechanics aren't hard. Getting resources isn't that hard. The game.... is not hard.... but it is made hard by the fact that you have no time to figure out how the game works or figure out what you are going to do. And it kinda sucks that what could be a solid strat/city building game for me is kinda ruined by this.
So if you are like me and want to take your time in a game like this and really figure out a good strat. If you have reading comprehension problems. Then this may not be the game for you unless you want to watch a bunch of tutorials for the game on youtube. It will help a bit.... but it won't help with the fact that you can't take time to strategize, and multiple playthroughs won't help much because maps are procedurally generated.
If you don't mind the lack of ability to use pause to at least figure out what you want to do, Then this is a solid game. A bit slow sometimes because there is no fast forward button, like when you can't do much of anything because you are waiting for enough food/wood/krowns to do things, but a solid game. I will also say that while I haven't played multiplayer mode I can see this being a pretty fun strat game with friends.
At the end of the day, on my personal note. The only reason why I'm putting recommend on this is because I understand that not everyone will have a problem with this like I do and that I understand the problem can be kinda fixed for some people like me by watching tutorials. That being said, I probably won't be playing it much because of the way pause works. I will probably still play the game some to see if I can get a handle on things, but it just makes the game not fun for me because it turns into a strat game with no time to actually strategize.