Recently, Laps Games and Iceberg Interactive released their new city-builder title Land of the Vikings on Steam. Any fan of Norse mythology and management-style games would know that means that there is a new test to come out on top of. Building a community, managing food and material salvaging, and ensuring the happiness of your people is never an easy task, but what would it be like if the people were the classic Vikings of Norse? Let’s find out!

Gameplay

Starting off, the game will have you build specific buildings and start getting people into various jobs. Of course, if they don’t have a job designated to them, they still find ways to be productive. In order for them to do that though you will also need to do the other basic starter tasks - cutting down trees and smashing rocks for materials. Don’t worry about the supply of trees and rocks as they respawn after some time - and it honestly doesn’t take very long.

Before long you will be tasked with setting up a farm and windmill for bread, a fishing dock and boat crafting building for fish, goat and cattle farms for meat, leather, and wool, along with many other buildings. Having the tutorial turned on in this game for the first time you play it is definitely very helpful, but it also doesn’t hold your hand.

Some things you’ll want to consider building that the tutorial kind of skips over is a stone mill to collect rocks continuously, a mine to collect coal, a chicken coop for eggs and meat, and more. Just be sure to check your full catalog of building options once you start getting the hang of things.

Where the game is at right now, you basically will get random newcomers that you can let in or deny and this will affect your food while giving you more labor hands, but keep in mind that your families also have babies of their own so your population will grow regardless. You have to build a single house for every single family as people don’t seem to bunk together. The standard civilization pieces are all there, but they have weird limitations.

Probably the most fleshed out aspect of the game so far is the tree of life which acts as a skill unlock tree. As you complete objectives, you will earn points that can be used to unlock different points on the tree of life. Unlocking things there gives you more building types to build and improves various forms of production throughout the city.

When it comes to the aesthetics of the game, I would say that they did a good job and it is pretty nice to look at. The two screenshots you see in this first impression are from my little village, one during the day and one during the night during the fall season before winter. The seasons do affect your village as well, so keep in mind that winter will always be the hardest as you can’t farm during that time.

Expectations

They have already announced a full roadmap of updates to come to this game, but even with those plans, there are definitely some things I hope to see updated for this game.

I thought it was ridiculous that both of my warehouses were essentially useless since they fill up so quickly on only one or two types of items. It has multiple items listed that it can hold, but the majority of them sat at 0 while it said it was completely full. Am I expected to have 20-30 warehouses to hold materials? If so, they are way oversized.

The same stock limit issue is found in the marketplace and a few other buildings. Having too much stock of stuff is incredibly easy and while I have that issue, every other building is complaining that they either don’t have enough materials or have nowhere to put the finished material they have. Perhaps putting a section in the tutorial focusing on stock and not just saying “build a warehouse” would be better because if I knew I needed tons and tons of space, I would have focused on a warehouse row early on.

In general, the tutorial seems to be a bit slacking. I found myself kind of hard stopped at the militia part of the objectives as I had no idea how to make a shield. I kept looking around to find how to get one made, but it didn’t seem I had the building to do that and I didn’t see any option in the tree of life to get a building to do that, thus I couldn’t train any soldiers. Perhaps even a help section to answer some simple questions, like “where do I make a shield” would be helpful.

Verdict

Land of the Vikings is definitely an interesting city-builder and even with this early build I found myself sinking upwards to three hours in a single session. I definitely see a lot of potential with this one and hope to see the updates bring the justice that this game deserves. With only a few upgrades and additions, this title is looking to be a top city-builder for 2023!

Land of the Vikings is available now on PC via Steam.