Land of the Vikings is a Banished-style building game set in the high Viking north. The Early Access title already plays quite well, but has a big problem.
Do you know Farthest Frontier, Foundation, Ostriv or Settlement Survival? These are all Early Access building games with a medieval setting that I”ve been testing lately for GlobalESportNews And those are just the Banished-style ones. Slight variations with other settings there were a few more. Isn”t it wonderful? So many build-up games! Wonderful, isn”t it?
Yes! And no. Yes, because city-building has been part of my DNA since Anno 1503. And no, because I”m getting sick of half-finished Banished clones. With emphasis on half-finished. Because all these titles, just like Land of the Vikings, have their own ideas, which are good, but always only to be guessed at. The only thing that is finished is usually the central gameplay loop around building a small settlement. And that is always the same.
So is there a reason for you to give Land of the Vikings a chance? The GlobalESportNews test provides the answer.
Table of Contents
The set-up 101
As is usual in the genre of construction strategy with survival elements, you start by marking trees and stones so that your individually simulated workers can get to work. With wood and stone, the industrious and will-less worker bees build their own houses and gradually raise a small settlement with the expected buildings: marketplace, warehouses, collectors, hunters, fishermen, fields, mills, carpenters, seamstresses and so on.
Compared to similar titles, however, the range of occupations and goods is relatively small. But there are a lot of decorations. You can use them to give your village a lively look with a lot of attention to detail, especially because in Land of the Viking you can also scatter everyday items around the village. For example, a bucket, an ox cart, torches, pennants and barrels.
If you place some of these decorative objects near a suitable building, they even bring bonuses. A scarecrow increases the yield of a field, crates and barrels increase the capacity of a warehouse and decorative objects next to houses indicate that the inhabitants are well off, which makes them happier.
Satisfaction is attractive
If, of course, contentment also plays a role in Land of the Vikings. If people are angry, fewer people move in, and if the approval rating drops too low, you will be chased out of the village. But that never happened to me in the test phase with my magnificent village of Gemsta.
The range of housing and clothing, for example, as well as the organisation of festivals and your decisions at events, all have an influence on satisfaction. For example, you have to settle family feuds, although the punishments are pretty nonsensical. I should behead someone or send a whole family into exile because someone might have stolen a dagger? Well.
The earth shakes, the pulse doesn”t
Sometimes you will also have to take money (generated by sales at the market) from the village treasury to help out the victims of an earthquake, for example. Because yes, in the land of the Vikings, the earth often shakes or a fire breaks out, causing some of your buildings to collapse.
This is a pretty annoying thing every time, because Land of the Vikings is not well balanced at the moment. Everything takes too long here. Above all, the mining of resources constantly hinders progress. Far too often in my test game I just sat in front of the screen and waited until a building was finally completed.
Thereby there would theoretically be a lot to do. Villagers all have individual value in luck, strength, speed and intelligence, which you can exploit through suitable jobs. A bear of a man works particularly well in a mine, Einstein best as a shipbuilder and Gustav Gans with the fishermen.
Unfortunately, the system gets a bit annoying in the long run because you have to move workers around depending on the season because of the farming. But if you pull people out of their ideal jobs via the job menu for sowing or harvesting, you later have to painstakingly reassign them one by one.
You have to do everything yourself!
Generally, the game still lacks automation and comfort features at all corners and ends; a circumstance that is entirely to be expected in Early Access. For example, if a resident dies of illness or old age, the affected building merely displays a message. Instead of someone automatically taking over, you have to do it manually and, on top of that, always keep an eye on the village. It is easy to miss a distant, empty hunter”s lodge. In the same way, slaughtering animals and harvesting fields becomes tedious at some point.
These are all no leg breaks and forgivable at the start of an Early Access phase. But while I wait for the agonisingly slow progress of constructing buildings, I really only have decorating available as a fun activity. And you can only put so many barrels in a small village.
Barely anyone gets as far as the looting trips
The eponymous Vikings could help. Because where it says Viking, it must also say warrior and longboat. And that”s what they do here. But until you finally unlock access to merchant and warships, it takes hours.
You can see how much the game drags on until then by the fact that I am one of the few who have even sent a troop on a raid. Currently, only 1.3 per cent of all players have managed to do that.
No wonder, because you need a lot of fame first. You can get it by completing missions (“Build a tavern”, “Train five archers” and so on) and by increasing your population. You then invest these fame points in a talent tree, which doesn”t tell you beforehand which technologies will come when. In addition, you can unlock a few perks, such as working one percent faster, running five percent faster and the like. And because fame is generated very slowly, all too often nothing progresses.
Vikings have been more dangerous before
When you can finally send your warriors on their way, it turns out that the raids are merely text events. And stupidly, the balance is not yet ideal here either.
After hours of preparation, my fully manned warship simply couldn”t do anything. Even the smallest village I knew of so far had far too high a defence value. I could have invited other Nordic villages along on the raid, but even together we did not have enough offensive power.
The venture therefore ended in disaster, causing the village”s satisfaction to slide into the basement. And not only that. My motivation was also gone. Because even if it had worked … what then? Then I might have got some resources and some money. But for what? To be able to build five more houses? There is currently nothing in the game worth the effort.
There”s too much missing to inspire for long
And here we are back at the opening theme. Land of the Vikings is pretty and plays well at first. A bit of settling, mining resources and decorating is always possible. But then it lacks a motivating superstructure.
Really good and, above all, finished building games fascinate either by the abundance of things I can do or offer a challenge of some kind. This can be a particularly hard fight for survival, the logistical management of huge settlements or even a time or turn limit.
But Land of the Vikings doesn”t currently offer anything like that – and thus joins an ever-growing list of unfinished building games that are all very similar in their core gameplay. This is the title”s big problem. For this stage in its development, it is a solid game to put on your Steam wishlist. But with all the competition, there are hardly any reasons to play it. Because what it offers so far I”ve seen too often, at least recently.
Preliminary rating box
Land of the Vikings doesn”t really deserve my negative basic attitude. Because what has been offered so far is rock solid. The price of 20 euros is reasonable and with a few months or years of development it can become a nice little building pearl. But at the moment it just doesn”t excite me. Everything the Viking game does I”ve seen too often recently. The looting expeditions alone could have given the game individual weight, but it is precisely these that disappoint in the current form.
And so my personal opinion is: Put Land of the Vikings on your wishlist if you like the visuals and the setting. But if you want to play a really good Banished-style building game right now, buy Farthest Frontier. So far, it”s simply better in all respects.
