In an effort to offer another RTS/civ-building game on the Switch (and other consoles) Shiro Games has ported the Viking RTS, Northgard, to the hybrid console. Though the inspirations from other civilization RTS games is clearly visible in its design and the flavor of Norse mythology mixes well with the genre, the real question is: can the gameplay compete with the titan that is Civilization VI on the switch? Below I’ll share my thoughts on the hours I’ve spent with the game, the good, the bad, and the Nordic. 
Starting up the game is fairly simple if you can read the menu text. Yes, unreadable text in Switch games has been a damper for many great titles and Northgard is the worst offender I’ve found. Both in TV and handheld mode I could barely make my way through the menus and in-game HUD. There is an option in the menus to change the visible safe area of the screen, but maxing it out made the text barely readable as opposed to completely unreadable.
Once I was able to see well enough to start a game, there are a number of difficulty options, map sizes, and AI aggression to choose from. Each of the games I played was on a medium map size with middling difficulty. Once you’ve made these selections, Northgard has a few different clans the player can choose to control. Each of them is represented by a mythical Norse creature that offers each tribe a different set of bonuses, units, and unique interactions in the game world. From what I was able to read, they were fairly varied with most of them having a clear focus like combat or expansion. Some were a bit more obtuse at first but after becoming familiar with the game mechanics, I began to see how playing them could be interesting.
The second hurdle to enjoying Norsegard though, apart from the microscopic font, is the lack of tutorial or intro of any kind. That’s fine for many kinds of games, but for an RTS with deep systems, tons of units, and multiple win conditions it mires the entire game experience. The game doesn’t help you with any of this. I repeatedly found myself in situations where I’d be doing something obvious, like building a dock next to the ocean, only to discover that the workers I’d assigned to sail that ship sitting there with a timer over their heads. After trying to find some kind of glossary of icons or terms within the game (not that I’d be able to read it anyway) I finally turned to google but after scrolling through steam threads it quickly became apparent I wasn’t going to find answers.
This is the most frustrating part of the Northgard experience: it’s constant trial and error with the solutions often making less sense than the problems. Because of this ambiguity, I can’t even say if it’s bad game design. Not the absence of a tutorial or a guide, that’s obviously bad game design for a title like this. But within the game itself, I typically had a hard time figuring out if I couldn’t perform an action because my units were glitched, or if there were some hidden requirements I wasn’t meeting to get them to “do the thing”.
Having only played Northgard on Switch I can’t say if these issues (possibly bugs possibly the product of ignorance) persist in other versions, but what I can say is this game runs ok. It’s not going to wow anyone with impressive visuals and it does its best to hit 30fps. The hiccups are minimal on medium-sized maps which is playable even if it’s not the smoothest performing game. The art style being a bit soft and cartoony helps keep different building types and units identifiable even at long distances and does well to highlight world events.
This is perhaps the most interesting part of Northgard to me and the main reason why I wish the game was accessible enough for people to pick up and play. World events happen in Northgard are actually interesting and impactful. This is something that even Civilization has struggled with over the years. Instead of feeling like the globe is just a map to be filled out and trodden upon by the tribes of Northgard it feels like you’re constantly battling not just AI-controlled opponents but the predictable and sporadic nature of the environment.
Each season is represented in the game and while winter is the only one that really impacts the player, it has a great impact. So much so that I found myself trying to prepare for it the rest of the year. Sometimes winters will be harsher sometimes less so but the feeling that I had to combat, not just the physical threats of invaders or hostile animals, but the elements themselves kept me on my toes even when things were otherwise peaceful. There are other global events like earthquakes or the Draugr opening portals to walk the earth. Without going into all of these events, I want to get the point across that those things are very cool and I wish the game was more accessible so that players could experience what Northgard does very well.
The problem though is that Northgard does two things very poorly: explaining what’s expected of the player and making the text readable. That’s honestly it. If they could fix those two things I could see this nudging Civilization out of the exclusive RTS spot in my Switch library, but as it stands I’m just tired of wrestling with a neat game that does its best to keep me from playing it.
If you have the time to read wiki after wiki page, have superhuman eyesight, or can try this game out before you buy, I encourage you to give Norsgard a chance but for those of you who want to jump into a game and start having fun from the get-go and or have regular human eyes, wait for some big updates before giving this one a second look.
