Before we start my individual review of Norland it’s important to understand that this game is on Early Access and was released less than two weeks ago – so you shouldn’t expect a complete title and expect some bugs occurring on your playthrough. The first bit of a rundown of the premise of the game
Lead your noble family in this medieval colony sim, facing off against class conflict, religious struggle, and political treachery. Tend to your people’s needs, uncover the lost knowledge of a fallen empire, and engage in nefarious plots against your enemies. ~ Steam Page
Norland has a lot of Potential
After throwing around 30 hours playing this game I have to say the core concept is great and there is great potential for this to become the best Medieval simulator eventually, but this can only happen if serious core gameplay mechanics are adjusted and changed. I Don’t want to babble too much about certain elements of this game like graphics, sound/music, and performance since all those are delivering really well – through my testing, I had no crashes, no massive FPS drops and the game just looks visually good and UI is mostly clean and doesn’t require massive overhauls.
I like to think there are two types of strategic sim games in this genre ones that revolve a lot around commerce/diplomacy and then the ones that are more war-orientated like Total War for instance. Norland perhaps leans towards the former a bit more – focusing on your own royal family while handling diplomacy with neighboring countries trying to join alliances or get vassals.
Based on my experience with the game I felt that there was a bit of a bias against the player who wants to raid and war a lot against other countries in the region, this can be seen in how the church/religious group behaves inside the game for instance. The combat itself is actually kinda cool, but my big problem here lies in the controls – you basically control battalions, but you are not able to, for instance, control the archers and move them around in the battle as you please, this made auto-battle everything because there was so much lack in macro or micro controls for armies in the game, hopefully, this gets expanded later on.
Some Design Choices are Very Bad & Have To Go
There are certain aspects in games that are deal breakers and I felt there were some in Norland that were absolutely not well thought out and I want to make a few bullet points here in case developers are going to read this at some point.
- Knowledge Sucks – What makes Norland bit special Sim/Strategy game is that there is clear “de-evolution” factor and what I mean by that is, we have knowledge system which serves as techtree for the game which allows you to build and craft things – but this knowledge is possessed by your so called Dynasty, but if these characters happen to die you lose basically everything. This prevents you from repairing certain things and fucks up supply lines pretty badly, logically civilizations don’t lose technology altogether if someone dies, so make techtree things permanent, or at least for the race you are playing.
- Settling Regions – The idea that when I captured a totally new region and appointed my brother/sister as head of that place and find out 2 days later that are no longer my vassal is just plain right silly. I feel that having the capability of owning multiple regions in the game is kinda essential and making sure that your allies won’t flip on you the very next second is also crucial. I also don’t like the idea that i’m not able to scout all the regions on the world map without being next to them.
- Weapon Systems Overhaul – The game needs a more rock-paper-scissors approach to how the weapons work and what is effective against heavy armor etc. I also feel we need more weapon types and perhaps archers need to be nerfed a bit as they are way too effective against unarmoured opponents.
- Manager System is Awful – In order to get peasants working on stuff in your town you have to have dynasty members give orders at specific buildings, at a surface level this wasn’t a bad idea, but once you were down to one monarch left or alive (perhaps other members are defending elsewhere or just outside of town) it becomes a quite a hassle to get anything really done. I Just feel that this should be totally scrapped – or simply make certain buildings and workforces do shit independently without having monarch giving orders, I feel like it would be just better to give effectiveness multipliers, but just allow workers to do stuff without orders.
- Call to Arms – When raided by bandits, unholy horde, or Church it would be nice to just have 1 button somewhere that would rally up current soldiers in your army and make them get weapons, this would make dealing with wolves a lot more ideal, this is obviously a bit of an extension what I said earlier about controlling your army in battle and I generally feel that we simply need more freedom how to move, attack and manage formations of the military in this game, I would also extend this to guards as well.
If these things were adjusted or fixed I would bet this game would become a much better experience for a lot of people – this is not a difficult question here, it’s simply a design choice that serves players poorly.
Closing Statements
Despite a wide array of critiques I have against certain elements currently in the game, I recommend lot of people wishlisting this game as it offers countless hours of content and a fair amount of customization for a few playthroughs. I think right now there needs to be a couple of overhauls to improve the gameplay to more my liking and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way – so let the devs cook a bit by improving existing core mechanics and add more content to the game like new buildings and recipes.
Even with the current content size, I think the price is quite fair and I hope there will also be modders in the future adding content to this one (If it will be allowed by developers at some point). I will likely do follow-up review when the eventual release happens, I just hope they make certain elements a lot more
