I just want to start off by saying, I absolutely loved Land of the Vikings, by developer Laps Games and publisher Iceberg Interactive, and can’t wait until it’s out of Early Access. When I say I loved this game, I mean even my friends noticed I was playing this game more than my usual ones. It reminds me a lot of the game SimCity BuildIt that I would play in middle school.
There are quite a few reasons I love this game, but one of the biggest ones has to be Laps Games’ attention to detail. Let’s start with the first one I noticed: births and deaths. Obviously in a game like this, you should be able to see your population at any point in time – and you can – but the added aspect of telling you who specifically died and who was born really surprised me. I mean especially if you’re keeping up with families (I wasn’t though). However, I’d see the message of someone dying and then suddenly my hunter’s hut didn’t have a worker – and that would happen multiple times over the course of my gameplay. Apart from that, if you zoom in, basically on anything, you can see and hear everything that’s going. I will admit that it does jumpscare me.
After I had just built my carpenter’s building and they had gotten to work, my ears got blown out. Easy solution – just lower ambient sounds. Did I ever do that? No. Did I get jumpscared every single time I zoomed in near the carpenter’s building? Yes. Yes, I did. The reason I didn’t lower the volume is because I like hearing the wood sounds when I zoom on the builders. It’s surprisingly very calming to me (also pretty satisfying seeing the progress of the building – which I will get to later). There are a lot more ambient sounds too – cutting down trees, mining stone, environmental sounds, and probably some more I am forgetting at the time of writing this. Another cool detail I noticed was the ability to change your villagers’ name – first names, last names, baby names, all the names. I would definitely say if you want to change names you should try and be on top of it because one moment I was sitting at 30 villagers and the next I had 160.
Speaking of villagers and increasing populations, you get newcomer dialogue quite often. It’s basically phrased as if only good can come of inviting new people in because if you turn them away you lose fame (which I still don’t know what that does just yet). However, the homeless people in your game pile up really quick, especially during the winter.
Granted in this screenshot, there were only 4 homeless people, but the larger my village became the more of them there were. One could say it mimics life. Similarly, the happiness of the villagers plummets significantly in the winter – just like real life. I definitely feel as though my village was in the trenches, especially during the winter. I obviously couldn’t plant anything; my hunts were significantly less fruitful, as well as my gathering; and for some reason I could never keep up with the demand for firewood. Although, I will say I always had plenty of coal, but for some reason it was never used. I am most likely missing something I’m supposed to do with it, but yeah winters were no bueno.
At one point, my herbalist building was full of patients. Yet another detail the developers added is that you can see every villager’s needs and their status. You can see their age, strengths and weaknesses, job, family, even where they live just by clicking on them. They even had little blurb for their strengths and weaknesses which I thought was a cute little detail. I definitely don’t think a majority of players will notice something like that, but I find it fun once in a while to just click on their stats and connect the families to dialogues/events that pop up.
While I happen to be on the topic of events, there are quite a few of them, ranging from the aforementioned newcomer events to literal natural disasters (again mimicking life, they are cumbersome to deal with). I know I said earlier it’s phrased as though only good can come from it. Well, I lied. I think literally only conflict arises. Either someone’s getting bullied, washing their clothes in the wrong places, or just straight up homeless and squatting in places. And sometimes, you don’t even really win in the conflicts. For example, in the bullied event, the best solution is donation and the victim becoming disabled. The way this game mimics the consequences of life is perhaps more realistic than I thought (aside from the fact that you can’t just fast forward life).
However, that is an aspect of this game that I absolutely adore. I can literally just sit there and play without having to wait extremely long times for things to finish. This wait time – which is meant to encourage players to log on every day – weens me off games similar to this one. In middle school, I ended up deleting SimCity because I couldn’t stand waiting days for things to finish or having to pay literal money to speed up the process. While I understand that mobile version of SimCity at its core is a free-to-play game and Land of Vikings is $20 up front, I think just being able to fast forward helps loads. When I first started playing, I thought there would be a time barrier to getting my buildings. But nope, as long as I have the workers and materials, it will get done – I can literally see it actively being built (touching on the point I mentioned earlier). It also helps with the other technical stuff like gathering materials or waiting for a trade ship. You can basically fast forward through everything; there’s no real set time barrier in the game that isn’t based on in-game time. To rephrase that, you don’t have to wait 3 real life days for your trade ship to come back or for anything.
Now that I have hyped up this game (that I am genuinely excited for), I do feel like there is some room for improvement, mostly regarding the building part of the game. I really wish there was a grid system for building. My village is incredibly crooked, despite my best in making things straight. They do have an align feature, but it snaps objects to only one place, so there’s still room for player error. I also wish that I could move buildings after I place them. So, I could essentially pause the game and rearrange my entire village. In a sense, the lack of this feature mimics life once again, but I do think it’d be nice to give players the option. Another thing that was a pet peeve to me are the regrowing trees in relation to building. Sometimes I would chop down an entire area of trees, however, they’d “regrow”. By regrow I mean, they’d basically be bushes. Like if I highlighted so my laborers could cut them down, they would just disappear. Despite that, everytime I tried to place a building on it, the game would tell me it’s colliding with something. It’s just pointless extra steps I feel to place a building – especially if the tree isn’t even really a tree yet. The last thing I think would be great is having a help section in the Tree of Life, explaining some not-so-clear things. They do a good job in the beginning – even having video tutorials – but after that, players kind of have to figure things out of their own. Sometimes these things aren’t always self-explanatory. For example, I had unlocked trading in the Tree of Life, but I couldn’t build a trade ship and had no idea why. So, I kind of just shot an arrow in the dark and kept expanding the trade section on the tree until it was like “you can build a trade ship!”
All this to say, I really enjoy the game and am looking forward to updates/improvements in the future. I also suggest joining their Discord (as I did) so you can see other players’ suggestions, feedback, and villages.
The Land of Vikings is available for PC via Steam Early Access.
Related: Reviews by Maryanne Fadonougbo
"I've enjoyed gaming since I was little, playing games like Pokémon, Rayman, and Naruto every day. Besides that though, I've always had a love for writing. Now I am combining the two for the best of both worlds! My ultimate goal is to do narrative design for video games."
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