Northgard

Genre: Real-Time Strategy

Players: 1-6 Competitive (Online)

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Review:

(Note: This is an outdated review. You can find the updated review here.)

Northgard is a Real-Time Strategy game, a genre that’s in short supply on the Nintendo Switch. Originally released on PC in 2018 and ported to other platforms including the Nintendo Switch in 2019, this game approaches the genre with a theme of a tribe of Norsemen exploring a new Northern continent.

The presentation here is good, with decent 3D visuals showing your tribe working on the tasks you assign them, fish and wildlife moving about, and the changing weather conditions as the year progresses. This is paired with a nice instrumental soundtrack well-suited to the theme.

As for the gameplay, this game has problems.

Firstly, this game is poorly optimized for the Nintendo Switch. The game uses some really small fonts that, oddly, display fine in handheld mode, but are a pain to see in docked mode. What’s more, this game has no support for the touchscreen at all, despite being in a genre that really could use it.

However, the main issue I had playing this game is that its gameplay just didn’t seem to be acting how it was supposed to, which in turn made it impossible to actually play this Strategy game strategically. I seem to have a plentiful supply of townsfolk who are unassigned, yet structures went unbuilt after requisitioning them and buildings refused to let me assign new people to them, for reasons the game refused to make clear. I’m constantly wanting for supplies, but no matter how many fisheries and hunting lodges I’d build and assign people to, for example, my food supply would continue to deplete. There’s a part of me that seriously wonders if maybe I’m just not understanding this game on a fundamental level, but I can’t very well excuse the game if that’s the case, because if I’m doing something wrong here, the game isn’t letting me know just what that is.

In many other ways, this game operates perfectly fine, but if simple fundamental things like building structures and resource management are randomly and inexplicably locked off from me, I can’t very well appreciate those elements of the game that do work. It’s as if I were playing a Platformer and the visuals were striking and the level design was good, but the jump button only worked half the time – that’s a flaw that renders the rest of the game unplayable.

The really frustrating thing here is, I was absolutely delighted to get an actual Real-Time Strategy game on the Nintendo Switch (you know, one that’s not yet another Tower Defense game), and Northgard seemed to have many of the elements in place – decent presentation, an interesting seasonal cycle, a nice theme… but for all my attempts to try to get into this game, I can’t seem to escape the conclusion that it just seems broken on a fundamental level. As a result, I simply can’t recommend this game, as much as I was hoping I could.

tl;dr – Northgard is a Real-Time Strategy game that has all the pieces in place to be an excellent entry in the genre. The visuals are good, the concept is sound, and there are even some unique mechanics here to set it apart. Unfortunately, the core gameplay of this game is broken in a way that makes it unplayable. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to me, and if I was missing something that made it not terrible, the game was in no rush to enlighten me.

Grade: F

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