I can not recommend Aska.
The game had so much potential, but the devs have no idea how to design fun gameplay loops. It's been like that for years too now. New features are added, instead of improving or fixing older ones. The game thus has a lot of features, all of which - and i mean [b]every[/b] single feature - are tedious and annoying, or even require tons of manual involvement and micro management to work throughout most of the game. Default settings, for example, feel like they are actively designed to ruin your run. And i don't claim that lightly. Some 'features' seem to only exist to make your life harder as well - which would be fine, if improving upon those issues was part of the games progression.. but that is not the case. Most things will permanently remain tedious and clunky.
The resulting experience is, to summarize it in one term: frustrating. It's not helped by the fact that it feels artificially dragged out. The game does not value your time whatsoever. It's also extremely grindy, but in a bad way. Generally speaking, we enjoy grindy games. Grinding towards a goal, or to solve previous problems for good, can feel amazing. In Aska, however, grinding is just mundane chores and tasks that never end. It feels extremely unrewarding and is actively hindered by, for example, the amount of goods you can transport. Which never gets meaningfully better. Carts are a bandaid and not enough for lategame quantities - especially considering villagers don't use them to save time when transporting bulks of items, which would be neat.
The idea of the game is to build a self-sufficient viking village. But that's not realistically possible. NPCs are extremely incompetent. Defaults are set to actively sabotage you in every way imaginable. Managing it all is a huge, inefficient, and annoying hassle. The user experience of navigating the UIs is terrible too. Nothing 'just works' - especially not without first messing with some menu. There is a complete lack of conveniences and just common-sense features. You can resummon villagers that die - and to respawn yourself, you will kill a villager. Granted that you can resummon the same villager, one may assume they still remember where they were housed, what their schedule was, and where they worked. But that's not the case. You can't even look up [b]where[/b] they worked yourself. So if a few villagers die in your first winter invasion, or leave due to bad conditions, and you resummon them, you got to guess your way through how they each were configured. Manually. For every single last one of them. Every single time.
You generally need [b]tons[/b] of villagers for any little thing (and need to configure all of them). It is hard to explain how bad all of this is without examples, but while the entire game serves as one big example of what not to do, i can't be bothered to write another max length character steam review either. That said i'll try my best to get the idea across, so you can make the informed decision not to buy Aska.
We've been thinking that "just 10 more villagers or so" will solve any issues. But it never stops, because of how little each individual one villager can do. Take security as an example. One NPC can do a lot in combat (given the right gear) - but getting them to actually fight is a whole other story. You would assume that fighters, fighting being their only purpose in life, would just run to where the village is attacked. That is not the case. They will only fight, if they [b]personally[/b] notice an issue. It's not your job to make sure that any attack on the city is.. well.. noticed by the right people, i guess? For one, you can make your fighters patrol. Which, of course, means they can't train during that time - so it's one or the other. Given that people also need free time and sleep, and can't be at all locations at the same time, this skyrockets the amount of people you need for defense [b]immensely[/b]. Guard towers can help with this. If they notice an attack, they blow a horn and notify all villagers [b]in that area[/b]. 'Area' being the key here. There is no way to notify the entire village. So fighters training in or patroling the south of the village will happily continue to do so, even while the north of the town is in high alert, with walls being destroyed, and the horn being blown.. until they are [b]personally[/b] inconvenienced by it, or notice an enemy. Villagers alerted by the horn also could not be bothered to go and notify the militia, or do anything else that helps. Not to mention: like anything else, guard towers obviously need people in them as well. One per guard tower - technically two, if you want 100% uptime, due to sleep. And suddenly, despite needing maybe 2 well-equipped fighters to handle [b]any[/b] common attack on your village, you can expect to invest 10-20 people into making sure 2 make it. Why? All of that is overhead, simply because of bad design. If a guard tower that heard another guard tower blow their horn also blew theirs, this problem would not exist. If alerted villagers went and alerted the combatants, this issue would not exist. Heck, have combatants be omniscient and notice an attack on the village automatically. Realism? It's a game - but if that was the key argument here, how comes villagers can be omniscient about item stocks and where to find them? Same logic. Anyways - it's like that for everything. A huge mess that feels like it was not fully thought through, pushed live, and then left to rot for players to deal with.
Eventually we had a village with over 100 villagers. It was semi self-sufficient and somewhat able to deal with enemies without taking major damage.. but it did not feel great either. Felt like we needed "10 more villagers," i guess. The issue with adding more and more villagers is that the game does not run particularly well either. On our hardware (i7 7700k), we've spent the latter half of our playthrough running at 20-35 FPS or so. And that's tens of hours we are talking about here, since everything takes forever to do.
Some of the performance issues were the villagers themselves, some of them just (yet again) bad design choices. The worst offenders being woodcutters. They will annihilate entire forests just to get the resin your shamans need to keep your buffs running. But since you don't need the wood, there will be patches with [b]thousands[/b] of items (logs, sticks, fire wood, bark, ..) just lying on the ground, tanking FPS and getting worser by the month. So eventually you start to optimize for FPS and disallow your woodcutters from collecting resin. But now your shamans will quickly run through all your resin, meaning you need a substitute. Since their fires can't simply run on coal or fire wood, for reasons (duh), the only alternative is fish oil. Which requires multiple fishers and additional cooks just to get the required amounts of. Another 8 or so people to supply your 4 shamans. That's 12 people involved in [b]just[/b] keeping the buffs running. You get the idea.
TL;DR:
The game has anything from fun, over efficiency to game performance crippled by arbitrary design choices. Many of which could easily be fixed, but which does not seem to be a priority, or within the capabilities, of the dev. There is tons of problems without good solutions, and a bunch of attempted solutions for things that really shouldn't have been problems in the first place. Everything inbetween in either tedious, inefficient or otherwise unfun to apply or utilize. Stay away. Play a well designed game, instead of this patchwork.
