Tribes of Midgard Review (kroltan)
This game is weird. First of all, it's terribly unpolished in basically every way possible. It's not broken, but it feels just shy of being so.
I have only played the survival mode, but the pacing is horrible. At the start of the game you struggle a lot against the game mechanics (not even challenging enemies, just gameplay inconveniences), but then before you know you have every crafting station maxed out and there is basically nothing else to do.
There are 2 kinds of bosses: "Jotunn", which are early game bosses with very generic mechanics, whose drops unlock new crafting stations, and the other kind I forgot the name, which have more specialized mechanics that are genuinely fun, but placed so far into the game's material progression that you're really OP by the point you go fight them, so they end up being total pushovers.
In addition to the weird pacing, there are lots and lots of small frustrations mostly related to polish, or just badly thought out systems. If you want a viking survival game, get Valheim, if you want a lootfest top-down action game, download Path of Exile.
- First of all, what rubs me the wrong way is how certain items are locked to the "battle pass" progression system, or have to be bought with soft-currency in the shop which also shows hard-currency ($$$) items. This game does not have nearly enough content to fill out a battle pass with fun rewards, so it really feels like a way to drag your face over the shop so you maybe buy something;
- While I'm dissing the shop, it's not even a good shop. You can get item recipes at the shop, but those locked recipes still show up in-game, it just says "go to the shop to unlock", with no pricing information, along with the stats. But there is no way to open the shop in-game, you have to actually LOG OUT of your session and visit the shop from the main menu. However, the shop on the main menu has the price and the ability to buy, but does NOT show the stats! This means that an informed purchase requires entering a world to see the stats of the item you want, leave the world to go to the shop, see the price (possibly log into the game again to farm some currency), then buy it and log into the game again to actually craft the thing. If you want to force a shop mechanic onto the players, it should at least be convenient to use!
- Again regarding the shop, this is a paid game with optional cosmetics using a paid intermediary currency. Just use the DLC feature on Steam and be upfront with the pricing! The main menu really feels like they meant to port this game to mobile.
Now to the actual game:
- You can build bases, but that is literally useless, as they have no practical uses like keeping monsters away or whatever, it just makes reaching your crafting stations harder;
- You can build bases with a roof or multiple floors, but the fade out effect is terrible, making navigating the lower floors very annoying. Since there is no gameplay benefit for having a roof, I just made a couple walls open to the sky to keep visibility.
- In this game you build lots of different crafting stations, and you can upgrade them to higher levels using materials. However, breaking them does not yield all the materials you used to build them! So breaking a high-level crafting station means gathering more materials again, which means you don't want to move them if you don't have to.
- Also, the building limit is very small. Using the roofless technique described above, I could only make two tiny houses, packed as tightly as possible, before reaching it. This is not a game where you would have a "forward base" or something like that.
- Storage is kind of nice, it uses the same system as Terraria in that you can craft with items from nearby chests without having to pull items to your inventory. And while there is a "deposit all" button, there is not a "withdraw all" one, so moving your chest around as your base grows is very unwieldy, requiring clicking on each item (and there are a lot of different item types in this game)
- The physics in this game is horrible, not only monster attack hitboxes are terrible, but you get stuck in every kind of terrain that isn't a perfectly flat field of freshly mown grass.
- Speaking of monster attacks, there are no wind-up animations, and the Jotunn bosses' attacks are not correspondent to their animations. The ice jotunn has 2 attacks with the same animation, the fire jotunn shoots projectiles out of any angle, even though the animation suggests he is spitting fire, the dark jotunn has a basically instakill AOE that is triggered in the span of half a second, so you always have to fight her with your eyes glued to your own character, so you can't see the boss's animations.
- Skill descriptions are clearly handwritten, with outdated values that don't match anything you see on screen.
- The game has "elemental damage types", and various different tiers of weapons. But not every weapon element goes up to the same tier at the end game (I ended up using a Dark bow against Dark enemies because it was a tier above the best Thunder bow, so even though it dealt reduced damage it was still more powerful than using the correct counter-element of a lower tier.)
- Bows are super unbalanced, at the early game you are dealing maybe 20% of the damage a melee weapon does, but then they surge up insanely at the end game and there is no point of going melee, where you could actually (gasp!) get hit.
- The map is huge, but is mostly made of boring filler content that gives shit rewards. A escalating series of enemy "encampments", but after the first couple upgrades, 80% of the map is trivially easy, and gives resources that only end up piling up in storage because you have no use for them.
- There are lots of game mechanics you unlock towards the later game, but they are completely superfluous. Potions are useful for about 2 hours of gameplay between you unlocking them (and being able to afford crafting them!) and you not needing them anymore because you have armor that does the same thing or better, but permanent.
- Food is terrible, it heals a tiny amount to the point I didn't even bother crafting it. You can only carry like 6 pieces of each, and each heal about 5% of your health after the early early game. There's also a cooldown so you end up being able to heal 30% of your health over... 2 minutes? Not amazing, just get the vampirism perk that heals on kill and murder the easy enemies (basically any of them).
- Bosses get stronger every time you kill them, but it's just increased HP/armor, so it's not more of a challenge, just more of a bore. Most of them you can solo, just hold left click with a bow for 20 minutes until they die.
- There is an "essence" system which is basically "planting" arbitrary resources (you can plant iron, not just plants, lol), and you can upgrade the rate these essences grow by playing a wave defense type minigame at certain spots on the map, but the essences are so unwieldy to use and the resources they offer are so abundant otherwise, there is no point in doing that except if you want to pad out time.
I guess the underlying theme here is the game is afraid of actually challenge the player or ask them to think. There is grind, for sure, the bosses with tons of health, the sapling upgrades, collecting resources to upgrade crafting benches, but all those actions are a matter of time put into the game, not a demonstration of your mastery over the game mechanics. You find a new boss only for the items you get to completely trivialise the fight. You find a cold climate you have to bring cold clothing and potions to survive, but immediately you find a resource that allows you to craft a better armor that protects against cold AND heat better than the potion. There are elemental weaknesses but all the enemies are a cakewalk anyway so there is no point in caring, just get the best base damage and you'll be OK.