I've played a lot more of this and have identified a lot of the issues so here's an update;

You're going to experience one of several spirals but they're all inevitable.

The most egregious is the need to constantly be expanding; if you're anything like me once you reach the endgame, you like to just watch. Anno, Cities Skyline, Frostpunk, there's something about looking at your hard work and just watching it run that is incredibly satisfying. Even in a cold sweat game like Frostpunk there reaches a point where you're left to just watch what's happening in between the panic.

This game is not going to be one you can currently sit back and relax in, there's a reason - you MUST always be expanding. At all times. The larger the population the more you simply must just go ham on building more and more till something will either slip past your notice (which is incredibly likely as you can't track statistics, yes you read that right) or you'll inevitably be unable to keep up with the higher and higher requirement of any given resource.

Now the fact that you can't track stats is a deal breaker to me Early Access or no but here's something that I have never experienced in a city builder before and it requires some explanation if you want to hop off here. I'd say check back later and hold onto your money.

The positives are that is has a cool premise, unique theme, and an interesting foundation to work from - even if the UI and a lot of basic features are screaming for help.

So, if you're still with me let me describe the actual worst thing ever, collaborated by other people in the discussions.

Houses are not multi-generational and people age WAY too quickly, the parents ‘own’ the home and their children will reside in the home. Once the parents die the children stay in the home and not establish a new family… because they don’t have a new home to move to. If you’re seeing the issue here it gets so much worse.

This creates a perpetual cycle where you’re trying to maintain a balancing act where you’re unable to maintain a population because eventually you’re going to experience entire households dying off without creating new families and ‘newcomers’ to your city can’t really be relied on to replenish because you have houses of people who are aging and the household isn’t freed up to accommodate new people so houses are required to be built to and… yeah.

It needs some help. How? Well I don’t know I’m not a developer but this is going to be the ceiling a lot of people who are intent on reaching the end game are going to smack their face into. I hope they can wrangle the system into something that works because as it stands the tuning is off key.

This is a hard review to write - and I hope the dev reads this and is able to right the ship. At the point of this writing, I am nearly 40 hours in and on year 9 of my second settlement. At this time, only 8% of players have made it successfully into year 9 in their cities.

Look, this is a good game. But here's the deal- many of the functions of this game are only there to slow down progression, and extend playtime. If you were to play the game with the hope of refunding it, you would have experienced barely anything by the Steam refund time. For example, I have created two cities (more about that in a bit) in 40 hours. In that time, I am probably about 50% down the tech tree. It would take me another 50 hours like to get the rest of the tech, and honestly that leftover tech is useless.

The game is just a ramshackle of rough, unfleshed out ideas and a lot of "let's throw it on the wall and see if it sticks." On it's merits, it's a Banished clone, but a very light version. Resources are effectively unlimited, which is fine, but spread so far out at times that it can take a year or two to eventually reach iron and/or coal, and stone quarries. Food is also very simple - you have 5 resources (red meat, white meat, foraged foods and bread). Vegetables are mentioned, but they do not appear to be in game. Also, you can make barley to create beer, which is listed as a "food," but isnt actually used unless you send ships to trade/explore/raid, or in the tavern. All three of these are way down the tech tree - so there is virtually no reason to even plant barley until you have the requisit buildings.

Let's talk about combat. About 6 hours into the game, roughly 2-3 game years, you will have a choice: trade or combat. You can't do both unless you have massive tech points, so what ever you choose will lock you for a while. This choice also stalls out your city progression for a while as you will not have enough points to move "up" the tech tree towards city upgrades. So, you pick combat - you can now make light infantry and archers. They both need leather and iron for armor, iron and coal for weapons, and iron and leather for shields. Making one soldier early on is time consuming and requires a massive industry - even though you can get through the game with only two tailors and one smithy. Once you have your equipment, you have to train your people. Takes about half a season. Meanwhile, they are getting older and quickly approaching a natural death (which is a debuff to city happiness, not that it matters much). Your soldiers are effectively worthless until you can build a drakkar warship, and even then they'll still mostly be worthless since you can only fit 10 on a ship at a time, and still, they need a hero to lead them. In my first playthrough, my hero got stuck inside a house and wouldnt come out. Dev said he couldnt fix it, so I had to restart.

So let's say you finally get enough resources for to raid other settlements, what's next? Well your soldiers have no idea where the enemy is. So you send them on 3, 6 or 9 day scouting missions to find villages. They apparently sale randomly around Europe, sometimes discovering both Wales and Holland in the same trip, but missing everything else in between. Even once these places are discovered, you have no idea of the strength or how rich the town is. So you keep sending scouting parties. This alone takes another two or so years to flesh out. Finally you are ready for a raid. One ship is never enough. You're party needs to be mixed - too many light infantry and they get slaughtered. Archers are only semi-useful sometimes. Heavy Infantry hits harder, but they also appear to die much easier - which seems odd. I never did unlock the other units.

Combat is card based, with each card having a % chance at success. You never get anything that tells you how to influence these cards, so it's always just a blind role. Usually, most cards give you a 70+% chance. Every battle is basically the same. Pick how you enter the village, pick what your first attack is, pick how you respond to the defenders attack, then pillage the city/church/surrounding area before reinforcements show up.

So maybe you you made it this far in the review and say to yourself, "Huh, that sounds like a lot of fun, but rewarding!" Well here is the rub. By the time you can finally muster enough resources for a raid fleet and army, you effectively do not need any of the items from the raid. Plus, your losses are either too much to recover from, or your economy is so strong that you can keep stamping out units. But to what end? By year 9 my warehouses were overfull, and my people spend most of their time just milling about.

Trade is the same way. There is literally a tech that allows you to research trade, but locks you another year or so from being able to trade because the trade ship is in another tech. Also, you can't trade anything of substance. Maybe you focuses on food and leather and want to trade that for weapons and armor? Nope. Gotta trade for iron and coal, then build the stuff when you get home. Don't have an iron smith yet? Too bad. Maybe you have to sell off your massive stockpile of beer you made that you cannot use. Nope. Beer is not a trade item. Oh, hey, maybe I can see off some of my excess armor and weapons? Nope. Not a trade item. This literally makes 0 sense.

Okay, one final rant before I put down some pros and suggestions. There is an event system in the game. Its bland, repetitive and serves no purpose other than to slow your roll. There are literally only a handful. There is an event where one of your villagers basically starts screaming in the town center. Everyone hates him and beats him up. You can banish him, which makes the family hate you, or you can pay him 25 silver and he gets a debuff for life. It happens, like clockwork, nearly ever season. If you dump them, be prepared to have nearly every family hate you at some point. If you dont, then expect to pay a 25 silver idiot tax every quarter. There is also a thief mission, where someone steals food. You can choose to do nothing (everyone mad), pay silver to create a pose to find the thief (you lose more money and in some rare events, you may catch the crook) or you can beef up security (which requires you have soldiers unlocked, and city defenses....which is wayyyy down the tech tree). Sometimes Freya will bless your fields. No idea how or why, it just happens. On one map, every year my animals got a disease and I had to kill them. This slows down your progress again as you do not get to keep the resources. Sigh. There are only like 2 more events, but you get the idea.

So pros - It's slow. Maybe that's not a pro for you, but it's a fun little pick up and play simulation. The problem is that I will often put it on, run it at 2x or even 12x, and go fold clothes. Trust me, nothing will happen while you are gone.

Another pro is the decorations system. It is still not fleshed out well, but each house and *some* buildings can be upgraded by using decorations. This removes the stagnant look of the cities, by adding your own customization. Even better, there are a bunch of assets on the workshop.

It also has a asset editor. I havent played with it, and honestly probably wont, but the editor allows you to create new versions of existing assets, like new houses, decorations, etc. More games need this honestly, and I wish the dev put as much attention into the game as he did the editor.

That said, and dev I hope you are reading this, here are some suggestions:

- Vikings were known for drinking mead, not beer. Consider adding an apiary asset that is harvestable spring and summer, and a meadery.
- There needs to be more early tech buildings before iron. Consider adding a wood craftsman and a bone/horn/antler craftsman. These crafters could make primitive tools and trade goods, and would be a good late-game resource sink

Char limit reached. Oh well.

Left a strongly worded review in their suggestions section, they literally fixed it in the next patch. Cool game, cool devs, +1.

Seems stupid as I really like this game, but cannot recommend it at present as I feel it's not ready even for Early Access

Lots of mechanics in the game are not explained, and for some that are they simply do not work. It states almost everywhere that you can use coal for heating houses, but you actually cannot and don't find that out until you either google it or wonder why you have warehouses backed up with coal and everyone is in their houses freezing.

Once you arrive at the mid game there is no way to keep up with the stone production, and you cannot fill your village with good houses due to the bottleneck in stone. On the first scenario you can only build one stone pit which isn't enough to sustain your village once you get to around 500 population and the game is literally a struggle.

It's far too easy compared to similar games (like Frostpunk) and I have like 3 achievements left to get from my first playthrough in around 40 hours of playtime (which quite a lot of it I admit I was AFK and checking in every so often). The progress in the game is so slow it's painful, you can see what you want to do but the game won't let you achieve it and you spend most of your time with the game on maximum speed waiting for things to happen.

UI is simply horrible. You can have a max of 2 windows open. If you move your mouse outside of the menu UIs (e.g. assigning things by quantity, like food for raids) it disappears, so it can take 5 attempts to actually do something. Resources would be much better if you had an arrow below the pane at the top of the window and the full resources dropped down, or was configurable depending on your stage of the game. I feel you have to go through too many clicks to get the information you require. The encyclopedia has about 7 things in it so you are mostly left with no guidance and even with google it can be difficult to find information on what you need. Usually you find out that it's either an issue with a bug or bad design. I'm not even sure defance is a word and sure it should say defence...

Once you complete all the basic objectives you are left to go native and pretty much there isn't really anything to aim for anymore except for the steam achievements. Even the raids feel pointless mostly, as most of the time I lose more than I gain by raiding, and the raid is basically just a short video that looks like it was made on playstation 1 with an outcome shown at the end. And yea, I'm sending enough attack power and not just sending my troops to die.

As I write this review my village got raided, we failed to defend and I got another popup saying the villagers are unhappy which is stuck over the top of the raid results and therefore cannot close any window. It appears to be a game breaking bug. Hoping I can reload the game before the raid, but if not then I will just quit it for now.

As I now own it I will check in again at a later date, for now it's a shame because some silly little things really let down what is otherwise shaping up to be a really good game and the early game experience is great, it's just very buggy and makes little sense later down the line. If they fixed the stone issue, game breaking UI and coal for heating I'd probably change my review to recommended, as if it worked then for the price it isn't bad value. I am reviewing this as an early access user but feel it's way less finished than most other early access titles.

Firstly I'm enjoying the game and will continue to play but so far it hasn't offered anything majorly unique to the genre to stand out. There are a few small differences as follows:

-Ease of making money, usually you only really make money in games like this through trade/raid but in this game you can get a steady income from your market. (While in some games the market supplies a bit of coin it's usually insufficient to actually do anything with or unreliable.)

-Field placement, I enjoy that in this game you place field fences, stretch them out and join them up to form fields rather than the standard square/rectangle blocks.

-Animal pen placement, when placing them you can stretch out the enclosure for smaller or larger size pens

-House styles, there are three standard styles of house that cost the same resource wise but look different. It's nice to be able to choose the style of house I want to build instead of it being random or uniform.

I haven't included personalities in this list since game play wise I haven't actually seen any way that personalities affect anything. I may be missing something so correct me if I'm wrong, but I really wanted to see a bit more social chaos going on based around different personalities since it is mentioned in the trailer. I also think that as a feature it would give this game the standout edge but without it, it's just a pretty viking themed addition to the genre.

I play all the colony sims.

Land of the Vikings is gorgeous but there are a few things about it that are absolute deal killers for me.

1) Forestry: you are discouraged from clearcutting because the trees grow faster and supply more wood if you don't kill the saplings, but wood is ALWAYS in short supply, you can't just set up some forester minions who are smart enough to chop the best trees, so you spend the ENTIRE game scanning the constantly for the biggest tallest trees. BORING, TEDIOUS.

2) Deaths: you rarely notice when someone dies leaving your key industries unmanned so you are constantly having to monitor jobs to see if the number of gatherers dropped and you have to remember if you have 3 or 5 gather stations because you only see "5 gatherers" not 5/6 or 5/10, meaning you don't know how many employees short you are unless you are holding in memory a lot of information. That's fine if you started the game this morning, but if you come back to a game or get interrupted a lot this game becomes super tedious just tracking jobs are filled. Apparently there is a future tech that autofills jobs but ... "play longer so it gets less annoying" isn't a selling point.

3) Gather/Hunting ranges: you have to plant your gather/hunt buildings out in the middle of nothing to get best coverage (a la banished), but once they are built you never know if your future actions are reducing their efficacy because clicking on them never shows you the range or percentage again. The games with moveable gather ranges are a better mechanic these days

4) Disasters: what stops a fire from burning down your village? Wells? Don't know. No tool tip mentions wells for anything but farming. Why does a thunderstorm last a month? Don't know, but it always destroys a bunch of homes and building is SO SLOW and wood is so slow that you've nearly always got pissed off homeless families.

And so on.
I want to enjoy this game but I cannot right now.

This game is set to release in early October, but I definitely wouldn't buy it anytime soon. It's not ready. It's full of weird little errors, the mechanics and UI are clunky as hell, there's a lot of information you really need but don't get, the "events" are incredibly repetitive, half the time the wording is so bad you're left confused what's actually happening, even the basics aren't there- random capitalization, no consistency from panel to panel or objective to objective... This game needs another 6 months in EA.

A city builder....not a game with a ton of action. I love it, and it clearly shows. 212 hours and counting. To the developers: your updates, and catering to the wishes of the community are nearly unrivaled. I'm very interested to see where this franchise is headed. Keep up the stellar work!

-Z

overall recommend but with some things i didnt enjoy.

Things I like:
Graphics are pretty good! The world is nice looking and the sound and music is good too! Gameplay is easy to grasp if you ever played any of these types of games and things generally work together well. The events that happen with the villagers add some cool elements and choices to gameplay. Roads are great and glad its not a grid only game like other games.

Things I do not like:
-Trees get in the way and grow back a little too fast. If you want to build something where a tree was then you gotta do it immediately after cutting. need a way to clear an area and keep it clear.
-Building anything is insanely slow. It's not fun and just frustrating. It's basically impossible to build everything you need before winter and feels like you're always playing catch up with the seasons.
- I wish they would have more info when you click a building. For example, the hunting lodge has a productivity rating that you can see when you're building it, but if you cut down trees around it, that rating goes down but you cant see the rating anywhere after you build the hut.
- TUTORIAL is not complete. They miss key things you need to build and you wont know that till things are going bad in your village.

Wow, so early on and this game is simply addicting. If you like games like banished this is for you.

[PROS]

- True Sandbox Experience
- Incredible amount of promise
- Active community and developer team
- Communicative development team
- Many hours of challenging or casual gameplay both feeling rewarding
- Excellent Art
- Interesting quests and spontaneous events that make it much more engaging and immersive
- TONS (And I mean TONS) to do. I have yet to have really any true idle time.

[CONS] (Please note, this may not be relevant at the time of reading, please check post date).

- Definitely early access, a lot of content coming but not there quite yet
- Can become overwhelming when you reach a certain citizen limit, even on lower difficulty maps
- Natural disasters are currently pretty horrendous, though they don't happen often, you can expect one every year at least with no way to combat it other than sitting through it.
- Stone should be much more accessible and take less of a migratory effort to move your population toward a stone quarry
- Animal Husbandry can be janky at times.
- Lack of quality of life mechanics such as allowing the automatic filling of roles (refer to when I say it can get overwhelming)
- Lack of life outside village, In Bannerlord they added cutscenes to depict certain events occuring. I think it would be nice to include some for trading and raiding to make it appear like it actually happened rather than just having a message saying it did.
- Does not have an extensive tutorial.

[WORTH NOTING]

- The Soundtrack is excellent but repetitive. It would be excellent to be able to hear a wider variety of music, maybe seasonally 3 different songs on loop.
- The ability to customize the houses more and create custom builds (sort of like in planet zoo) would take this game to a whole new level.
- PETS THAT ARE USEFUL, so many games add useless pets, and while they do add to the life of the world, they miss all the potential in expanding their gameplay. Allow us to have dogs we can pair with our warriors to increase damage, or herders to increase yield, or hunters to increase efficiency. That would be sweet.
- Terrain alteration would make this game worth twice what it is currently listed as ... I will only accept this as fact, not opinion.
- Adding more into the religious side and populace interaction would make the game feel more alive. Let us host meetings, let us host rituals for new borns, let me log on and feel like a viking, not just a puppeteer, but rather, in the city, with the people.
- Lack of customization in general
- Gridless... but not COMPLETELY. I feel very restricted by the environment. Referring back to the terrain alteration suggestion, maybe even creating some sort of random map generation would be a good addition, making sure all of them are fairly mold-able.
- No burial sites or rituals yet, your followers just poof away.

[CONCLUSION]

Is it worth the money? Yes.
Do I recognize this game is early access and a lot of what I listed may be added anyways? Yes.
Am I about to play this game right after typing this? Yes.

Hope you got what you needed from this.