Land of the Vikings is the new survival colony sim game from developer Laps Games and publisher Iceberg Interactive. If you have ever wanted to take control of a small village and turn it into a bustling, thriving city despite the hardships and obstacles, this is the game for you.
As the Jarl of the settlement in development, you have your work cut out for you. There are a million things you need to keep at the forefront of your mind at all times: how much resources you have, if everyone has a house to stay at, will your food reserves hold when the winter hits, etc. Of course, simply having enough to survive is not good enough because your citizens don’t just want to struggle with the bare minimum. The Vikings want their houses to be warm during the winter, for the village to be bright during the night, for nice clothes to be available at all times, and so much more.
Despite starting off small and rather insignificant, your village can and likely will quickly expand both in size and the available opportunities. Without further ado, this is our Land of the Vikings PC review.
Land of the Vikings offers players two distinct game modes: the Freeplay and the Immersive Mode. As comes from the name, Freeplay allows you to explore and build without limits. From a tiny village to a prosperous city, all at your own pace and with your own goals in mind.
The Immersive Mode is there to help the fledgling Jarls who are new to the game or the genre at large. In this mode, the game will offer you a tutorial (that doesn’t present or explain mechanics very well, admittedly) and introduce a number of objectives to ensure that your village keeps prospering.
However, if you were expecting a detailed narrative-driven campaign like something out of Northgard, you might be left disappointed. Land of the Vikings’ does not really feature a story per se as much as a number of tasks to fulfill and numerical goals to meet while your village grows.
Regardless of the mode you choose, the game starts slow, small and humble with but a few huts and a handful of villagers in the middle of nowhere. It is up to you to ensure that your people have enough resources, be it food or building materials, and to do that you will have to take control in your own hands. Unlike many other survival sims or colony/city-building managers out there, in Land of the Vikings you manually assign your villagers to do your bidding such as chop down trees, mine, work in certain buildings, farm, and much more.
The game features pause, 2x, 8x and 12x speed up to ensure you never have to wait too long for new developments such as finalizing constructions, events and more. It is especially helpful in the early game when your village doesn’t yet work like a well-oiled machine and you don’t yet have a dozen warehouses filled with various resources.
When assigning villagers jobs, you might want to look at their characteristics. No two villagers are alike, some are fast, some are strong, others yet are smart. And these stats affect how well they will be able to perform certain jobs. Over time the population of your village will grow thanks to the new settlers as well as families started by the existing villagers. On the other hand, the villagers also die, prompting the player to always be vigilant to make sure that all buildings are working as intended.
When it comes to the overall gameplay process, Land of the Vikings is using the age-old formula of the survival sim genre. Houses? There are a few tiers to choose from, with the better ones unlocked as you play through the game. To make sure your village grows and the people remain happy, you have to be on top of always having enough dwellings for your subjects.
The village has access to a number of gathering buildings and an ever greater number of production ones, allowing players to build various production chains, from clothes to beer and weapons and anything in between – provided you have enough space in your warehouses and marketplaces to store the goods.
The decorations offer an interesting way to spice up your village. Not only do certain decorations make your villagers happy (especially if you manage to keep your village bright at night), but they also increase the available space in the aforementioned warehouses and marketplaces. Surrounding them with carts, boxes, and chests immediately gives the buildings a more lively, down-to-earth look.
The game also features trading via ships as well as various raids, but it comes with an interesting caveat. In Land of the Vikings, silver and gold do not really seem to serve that much of a purpose. You do not pay your villagers, many buildings do not require monetary price and simply need enough resources, so pretty soon you will be swimming in silver that is really only spent on roads and events. At this point, trading only adds heaps to the already existing treasury. And raids unlock way too late to provide anything of note besides an extra gameplay hook.
The early game starts slow, but the mid-game has an interesting flow where you as the player have just enough agency to keep yourself occupied by manually filling buildings, ordering your settlers to farm, chop wood and collect stone. It feels similar to many other colony sims and yet different enough due to Land of Vikings’ additional features such as the villagers’ stats.
However, come late-game and this spin on the usual management goes away as you get to unlock the automatic assignment, farming and more, turning Land of Vikings back into basic and generic sim. And yet, the auto-assignment doesn’t work where it would have been the most useful, like sending out trading ships or repairing your fishing boats.
The Tree of Life, the game’s take on the technology advancement tree, is filled with both interesting choices like new buildings and tech that you will strive to unlock as well as padding nodes like villagers’ moving speed increase on the roads.
If you have a few hours to spend, Land of the Vikings will give you an opportunity to enjoy creating a settlement and seeing it grow, all the while adding little touches that make it yours. However, the game feels like it doesn’t know what it wants to prioritize and how to go about it, leaving a strange aftertaste.
The villagers’ stats are simply there with nothing else to say about it. The game’s manual approach in turn feels like an artificial slowdown of the progression until a certain point instead of an actual feature.
There are a number of resources to tackle, from stone and wood to herbs and meat and created finished products like shields, clothes, armor, beer, bread, etc. but you can’t easily check their status. Additionally, your builders might have a real problem transferring resources from one warehouse to another or to a constructed building, leaving you wondering why you have so much wood but the construction won’t start due to the lack of it at the site itself.
Some items also serve only a very specific purpose. For example, beer is something your sailors take with them into their voyages, meanwhile armor and weapons are only meant for your warriors. You can’t trade them off or use them in any other way.
All in all, Land of the Vikings tentatively introduced some promising features, but left them behind in order to be like everyone else under the sun.
Note: the Steam key was provided for the purposes of the review.
