Recent reviews by Varinathras

We played this coop as a group of 3-7 dwarves. Based on the current >80% positive reviews and price, that brought certain expectations with it. They were not met.

Rated by activity:
Survival Gameplay: 4/10 at most. Requiring everyone to sleep simultaneously while applying massive debuffs for not sleeping for a long time... bruh. They provided a small workaround for it by eating the right meal at the right time of day but 1/4 of the day has no matching meal, and cooking takes long, meaning 10-20% of the time my meal after waking up finished too late and was the wrong type of food for that type of day, rip ingredients. At least there was no obsessive thirst meter and waterskin requirement such as 'normal' Raft...

Combat: 5/10 (it works at least, even if it isn't intricate in any way). Doesn't compare to any melee slasher or even games that have combat as an option. Shield bash OP if your shield doesn't break in 3 hits.

Farming: 3/10, where bat poop????

Pacing/Progression overall: 3/10. There were 2 resources that we needed a LOT of (for literal agriculture and for quest progression) that only came as drops from certain enemies, one of the two enemies only spawned under obscure conditions. Every biome we went into, we had the max gear from the previous zone, yet our character would scream I NEED A BETTER WEAPON while using the best weapon available, eventually the best one in the game, sometimes 1-shotting an enemy but in the earlier biomes just doing very little damage.

Building system: 2/10. Can only build to snap in 4 angles (only 90 degree rotation allowed), walls snap weirdly to floors, foundations under walls are automatically placed but don't always get placed when they should, and 60-80% of the build pieces only unlock once you've already built 2-3 bases and given up on the building system entirely.

Attention to lore/story: hard to rate as I haven't read Tolkien's works recently, I assume based on the official licensing that they at least got a passing grade in the aspect of being true to the man's works, but as we played this in co-op and not with the intent of reading every one of the 150+ lore Appendices you get bombarded with (3-5 at a time sometimes when you touch one quest marker)... Sorry, but a coop multiplayer game where you can get constantly raided or die of thirst while reading is not the setting to put entire books of appendices to read. I feel like the developers wanted to include more of this as cutscenes but didn't have the time/manpower?

Singing: 8/10

Drinking: 6/10 because of how miserable farming is or it could have gotten an 11.

Overall a solid 4/10. Probably the worst survival I've played.

Play this solo, lower most difficulties to below the middle (you can access the sliders once the actual seed is running), except set patrols to max because you'll need the drops. Get it on sale.

Read before buying, friends!

This is not the best RTS out there by any means, much more a chill base builder than an APM intense RTS, as the unreliable unit pathing and way too many activatable timed abilities (each unit gets at least one, hero gets 4) will allow.
Worth? 8 euros on sale probs. 17 full price, nah.

Found out after completing 3/5 of the singleplayer campaigns that all multiplayer is not working and the game hasn't been updated in a year.

Could consider it abandoned. Singleplayer still works, has an endless builder and endless wave defence mode I have yet to try.

You could consider the store page misleading for calling the game Online PVP and Online Co-Op when you can't start a multiplayer server at all (readying up and starting does nothing). Won't refund for that as I will probs get 40-50h out of my 8€.

Disgusting business practice, cannot forge the unique DLC (Career) weapons without first buying the cosmetic upgrade for it, even if you just want a base weapon of that type lol

I heard this DLC had a rough launch. I played a first conquest mission (only mode I care about in Northgard) with this clan.

Didn't read anything about the clan before starting a match,
Won anyway (normal difficulty) without much effort.
10/10
There's some hitches even in solo when you get achievements, it needs some polish. Also my alltime profile matches all got deleted during the update that brought this DLC out, I now have ~550 matches but 0 wins. Instructions to have this fixed are in their discord, hopefully they do it soon for me.
I wouldn't let the existing issues stop you from trying out this clan tho, it won't save your profile from getting reset to wait either so you might as well have fun.

About the clan itself:
There's a different lore tree for it. Some 'lores' are repeatable.
You don't gather or build with wood, only lore. So that took me a moment to process, as your opening move no longer exists...
You grow your buildings from lore.
Each lore you unlock is actually a Ygdrasssil branch/building that you have to place. Some branches cannot be placed in the same tile as another branch, requiring you to place them wherever you can/have explored. It's not really clear (in Conquest) which ones can be moved; at least you can demolish them but that hurts a lot. Definitely some learning curve for the build order there.

In conquest many of the lore branches/buildings can be moved to a different tile (running little trees lol)
Some of them can be built/bought more than once. The UI doesn't make it very clear which ones can or cannot, and their location on the lore tree doesn't help with that either (didn't really see a pattern to it)

Generally the ones that can be moved are (example):
-Passive regen for units/vills in tile
-Passive gathering of ores
-Passive debuffs to gathering if placed in enemy tiles (many of these branches can be placed in neutral tiles to leech resources where an enemy would expand, or to heal your army passively so your healers don't get activated and get you food instead because they benefit from a branch that buffs 'specialized workers'
-They can be placed in an ally's lands in coop conquest to buff them too (or so I heard)


All in all, this clan plays very differently, as it arguably removes building and woodcutting and frost mechanics entirely (I guess cold isn't a problem at all for them?), is a semi nomadic support clan (in Conquest) that at the end of its lore tree can get a powerful special military summon as well for... you guessed it... lore. Somewhere between Boar and Lynx but complexer at first sight.

Seems like a cool premise for a game... It's been out for 4 years but the English language still doesn't seem to flow fluently in the menus.
Play a few turns, as a bank in the 1-territory state of Brittany.
War breaks out.
Tutorial forces me to side with the invading Loire, giving them all the weapons I had.
Loire wins, congrats!
Oh wait, Brittany no longer exists, a banking license costs 200K in France and I spent my money trying to evac to another country...????
... gg. Uninstalled lol

Revisiting this review with the current state of the game, leaving old review intact (update under the line):

There's a lot to like about the game, but also a lot to hate.
To a new buyer, I'll lay it out simple:
Playing the game solo is unlikely to be satisfying. The game centers around a persistent war (24/7) where vast imbalances in population per side and per region are actively exploited to overrun one side or the other. You are entirely dependent on what the rest of your team has done in the last few hours, as well as the number of players currently present, to stand a chance.

For someone who doesn't care, or likes being roped into big clan ops or plays with friends: You will catch a lot of flak for playing badly, but many clans are happy to take you in and teach you.

In general, there are a ridiculous amount of weird mechanics and clunky UI actions that nobody can really walk you through. As someone who enjoyed the logistics aspect of the game immensely, there are just too many grindy, buggy, needlessly complex mechanics involved in getting your stuff to the frontline. Scrapping is entirely unrewarding and unrewarded. The existence of seaports and depots is not explained ANYWHERE to new players, despite being the beating heart of backline logistics and bulk manufacturing. This leads to every new player making their own truck and then abandoning it 20 meters from a place where it could be safely stored instead of being stolen by partisans. The seaport UI is confusing, loses track of the container you're filling, the "anti-griefing" delays on pulling from public stockpiles serve solely to grief the well-intentioned solo public logi player, seaport 'pad' capacity is griefable, limited and often very stressful for new players accidentally blocking the entire seaport because they can't figure out what to do. Sailing a freighter is quite simple, but the drowning mechanic isn't explained anywhere. Disconnecting when switching regions is a very common occurrence sadly, and combined with the """"fun""""" winter mechanics, routinely leads to freighters freezing over at the border (because the driver reconnected at a town 5-10 minutes walk away, the freighter froze over already) with no way to defrost them, losing you up to 15 or 25 tanks, or hundreds of crates of supplies.

The amount of people playing to actively grief the other team is staggering and entirely ignored by the devs. They'd rather you buy the game, play your 2 hours and be unable to refund while all the bases around you decay because someone stole all the supplies and despawned them overnight. They prefer the money made from people buying the game on throwaway accounts to grief.

Many of the combat mechanics are entirely unexplained and unintuitive. The camera is angled-topdown, but aiming for height is nigh impossible. You must shoot the ground in front of a prone player to hit them. A player crouched behind cover can basically never be hit except through random chance. A downed player who was encumbered can halt a pushgun's ability to be moved entirely. Pushguns in general, through their 2-or-more-man crew, require a lot of coordination to use with strangers and are de facto ignored by new players despite their damage output and low cost meta. Clans hoard 100s of tanks for weekend ops/recruitment sprees/unknown reasons, leading to the frontline having 0 armor support through the entire week. Not all of these issues can be solved by the devs, as they are also a result of the social construct of clan/regiment behavior, but the devs are not helping either.

=======================
Post 1.0 Update:
Devs didn't want facilities to feel mandatory to win and wanted to integrate them into the existing logistics and base mechanics.
We're 6 months past 1,0 release and they are still largely separate systems that still largely conflict with each other for maintenance and priority.

Facilities are needed to make all end-game tech, such as (super) battle tanks, Tempest Cannons (train SC) and most of their specialized ammo.

Devs are adding meme vehicles like a grenade version of the worst AC in the game, and a tripod grenade launcher.

Worst of all, the devs do nothing at all about the rampant alting problems. People spend days, weeks building bases, facilities and masses of tanks and a few alt accounts disable defences and grief tanks and facilities in a single night to take multiple hexes and meta concrete bases in a single night.

The devs cashed out after 1.0 and are working on a new game, have a history of horrible Community Management, player interaction and moderation (such as giving a 1 week slap on the wrist to a moderator using his powers to teleport his team to respond to invasions).

Without serious attention this MMO will die to people getting another copy of this 25€ game at $1.62 (Argentinian regional pricing) just to grief with another account.

You'll enjoy the first 1000 hours if you're looking for a grind :)
Then realize you've maxed 150 useless weapons and burnt them all and spend the next 1000 hoping for a challenge