The developers gave up. Bifrost has been broken for a year, no progression. I recently came back because I wanted to get all the achievements in northgard. I did a lot. I only needed stoat and owl, but after finishing with stoat with a friend, got no star and then finishing challenge with owl found out that its been broken for a year. It was a great game at the beginning, but years of not fixing bugs with the game has shown. Please do not buy this game anymore, its broken and unless some patch for bifrost progression happens then don't bother.

I have really wanted to like this game.

Northgard is obnoxious. I really have tried to get into it, but it just keeps setting up road blocks to being an enjoyable game. I get annoyed and uninstall it, then every year or so I redownload it and play a couple more games, then remember why I uninstalled it.

It is a slow-paced RTS game in a similar theme to Age of Empires and alike, but deliberately paced slower with more environmental limitations. I like the Viking theme they went with, and the cartoony art style is actually kind of nice and balanced with the gritty themes.

The single player campaign was pretty good overall. Taught you the mechanics of the game and the narrative was enjoyable, and the difficulty by the end made for an entertaining but not frustrating challenge. None of my issues with the game stem from the campaign mode.

Once I had completed that though, I went to playing solo matches against the AI. And then the real frustrations with the game become apparent. Firstly, I understand the point is to highlight survival and make the game pace slow, and honestly it was one of the things that intrigued me about the game initially. But unfortunately, Northgard borders on tedious in this regard. Villagers are automatically spawning over time and that pace is glacial. There are often times in the early/midgame where I am just sitting, waiting for new villagers to show up. My base is fine, I am doing well, but I am short staffed and just twiddling my thumbs until I can keep playing the game. Secondly, your building and population limit is tied to how many zones you control and often in the early game you are extremely limited in how you can expand meaning you are stuck, again, waiting for resources and population to be able to, you know, play the game. Food is an INCREDIBLY important and difficult resource to manage. In the early game especially, you need to be dedicating 60%+ of your population to just food gathering. I understand the angle they are going for: food is a sparse resource in viking communities and you need to prioritize it. But when I have control of 5 zones, with 3 of them entirely dedicated to food gathering, and I'm still BARELY keeping my food increasing over the second winter, it does feel like I am playing a food gathering simulator over a RTS game.

Team games are very clunky. You are often being spammed by alerts that your opponents are under attack, when there is no physical way you can even reach them. In fact, the game will often erroneously alert you that YOUR units are under attack, but when you click on the alert it shows one of your allies squares being invaded by a raid. Unit control is horrendous, they clearly wanted to have some level of Starcraft-esque RTS micro (as the AI units do kind of micro a little at the higher difficulty levels) but the controls are so clunky and sluggish that effective micro is pointless. Trying to quickly select one unit out of a control group to pull back and lose aggro is an exercise in futility. Tabbing through control groups often pulls the camera back across the map to them instead of just selecting. It just overall feels not great.

That said, combat is not the only way to win the game and often it is not a huge factor at all. In fact, for the first half of the game you will likely be just fighting the environment before even reaching the opponent. Again, I like the idea of this but it feels poorly executed. Early game mobs can make or break an entire game. Positioned too close to a large wolf den, and didn't get a military up and running quickly enough? Well, you're about to lose a handful of those villagers that took an eon to spawn, good luck catching up. Pinned in by a few difficult zones near your spawn point? Looks like you are about to spend 15 min trying to break out of your area while your population is being hamstrung by the lack of expansion.

Finally, the game just isn't polished. The game is being sent out to pasture now, and there are still random games where I will get hit with an error popup that the game has become unstable and needs to close. You click on the Victory Conditions button? Eh, you didn't click dead centre of the button, so nah. Camera panning is erratic at times, the visuals get cluttered, alerts are often spammy while not keeping you updated on important information. When is my hero ready to respawn? Hope you are clicking on your barracks regularly to check! Here's several notifications about neutral mobs and their relationships with other players to keep you occupied in the meantime though!

The different clans are interesting, and I like the variety they add to the game. That said, asking $5 for each is a hilarious rip-off. They are NOT that unique to be asking that price for slightly different tech trees. That left a bad taste in my mouth about this game.

I never got into the online PvP games, but knowing how frustrating the game is solo I can't imagine it is a good experience. The issues that make the game annoying in single player would only be magnified in a competitve match against others. So much of it feels luck based that trying to be a competitive, skill based RTS seems ambitious at best.

I don't know, I really wanted to like this game but it just disappoints me. It has a lot of potential, and if you can see past all the flaws you might enjoy it. Despite the number of hours I have poured into it, I just can't recommend you pick it up. It is too frustrating, clunky, and poorly executed to be recommended. It is a shame because there is potential there, but it just doesn't work as well as you'd like it to. Halfway through most games I am wondering why I didn't just play AoE2 instead.

I Dont know. it seems like they should have stuck to the old RTS formula cause so far it feels empty and slow and like there is nothing to do and nothing happening. I find myself just sitting there most of the time.
I want to build units and see things happening like in the OLD C&C games. this is just like blaa...
Hold on I have to go orginize a feast to keep my stupid villigers happy. i would like to hurl them all into battle but no , i have to orignize a feast....o fun.