Cultures - Northland

TL;DR: fun for nostalgia if you played this as a kid, but does not hold up otherwise [h2]The good[/h2] It's a casual light-hearted city builder game. Campaign missions typically don't have any time pressure and most hostile factions don't attack you unless you make contact with them first so you can take however long you want building out your settlement and raising an army. Exploration is heavily rewarded, but not necessary, meaning you control the pace of the game. The art style is pretty and holds up well. It's nice and saturated, almost cartoonish and feels magical. Throughout the campaign you travel from the deserts of Africa to the cold and barren landscapes of Iceland and the art and visuals change accordingly, giving a lot of variety to maps. The soundtrack is also pretty good, although a bit repetitive. Upgrading buildings and setting up production lines is fun. Most buildings have several tiers of upgrades which change how the building functions and looks giving a real feeling of progression. There's a surprising amount of depth for a game so seemingly simplistic. [h2]The bad[/h2] Although the campaign is pretty long and the maps vary, you always end up building exactly the same settlement with the same production lines and layout which gets repetitive after a while. Some upgrades feel borderline useless after you min-max your basic settlement template. Combat is dreadfully bad. Although it has more depth than you'd think at first, it's still pretty basic and frustrating. Commanding even a mid size army is micromanagement hell. You have to equip each soldier with each piece of gear manually, there's very little automation to help with that. You have to constantly tell them to eat or sleep or to replenish their stuff once they return to base, otherwise they become useless in battle. Heroes are faster than regular soldiers, but kind of fragile and if they die it's game over. They die a lot as well since they run faster than regular troops and thus tend to draw aggro first. You can't give heroes better gear either. On some maps you'll have 4-5 heroes you need to babysit, otherwise it's instant game over. The above problem is made worse because the game doesn't have any form of autosave. If your hero's pathfinding messes up and they walk over a mountain into a pack of monsters and die you can lose hours of progress. There are plenty of ways to softlock yourself and lose progress as well. In combat either leave your heroes somewhere safe (which makes them borderline useless) or get good at saving every few minutes. Although exploration is rewarded with plenty of chests containing powerful items, it kind of ruins the incentive to craft those items yourself. In most of the campaign levels you can ignore armor and weapon smithing as well as crafting potions since you'll find more than you need in chests, making an entire third of the colony production lines useless. Iron and gold are powerful resources for late game armor, weapons and tools. However, since they mostly spawn on mountains and the pathfinding of miners is broken on vertical terrain you can't mine most of it. On some later maps almost all of it is out of range due to the busted pathfinding, essentially softlocking you or forcing you to painstakingly manage every step of the miner for a small ingot of iron. Although the game has a trade system it's mostly useless. There's rarely any good trade options and setting up trade routes is difficult, buggy and unintuitive. You'll spend hours trying to figure out supply lines only to get some useless garbage from the trades you might as well make yourself. Trading across water is especially frustrating. I ended up ignoring the trade system all together. Quests in this game are very basic and end up being either "craft X of this random item" or "walk to this point". There's a hint of diplomacy with NPC factions, but it's so basic it's mostly useless. There's rarely a reason to actually go to war since the requirements for peace are so easy and being at war with a faction doesn't mean much since they're very passive and nearly never retaliate and regenerate losses so slowly you can chip at them from a safe distance until they collapse. Going to war over resources is pointless since most resources are plentiful anyway and the ones you capture from the enemy are either useless to you or very hard to exploit. Some of the later levels drag on for way too long and the dungeon sections are very repetitive and boring. The story is overall too simple and uninteresting, even for a kids game. There's also a very distinct lack of "quality of life" features. For example there's no way to tell workers to replenish their tools or shoes once they wear out so you have to track this for every single person (often 20+) and manually tell them to do it. If they already have a lower tier tool they tend to not want to equip higher tier tools until the lower one breaks which makes upgrading workers frustrating.