When first saw this game, I was definitely intrigued. I love civilization building type games. The graphics from the screenshots look good. I got a copy of it and dove right in. The game has a lot of neat aspects to it but for me, I had a hard time really liking it. I will explain in a bit.
What is the premise of the game? This is from the App Store page:
Cultures: Northland follows the story of a wandering band of Vikings, guided by a quartet of heroes named Bjarni, his lover Cyra, and their friends Hatchi and Sigurd. Hatchi soon finds that his homeland is overrun by enemies. As a result, he calls upon his friends for help. The game’s campaign is spread out over eight missions, and you can also play an additional eight stand-alone missions that are unrelated to the story.
Game Features:
- 8 campaign missions with several sub quests and 8 single missions
- 4 heroes that join forces to fight the final battle
- Over 30 different occupational groups, updated job and skills systems
- 3 difficulty levels to make the game fun for everybody from beginners to experts
- Special effects like weather effects, fog, ghost units etc
The game is available for Linux and Mac; this is the port of that game. As I mentioned above the game has a ton of stuff in it and I had a hard time getting a handle on it for a few reasons. I played the game on my iPad mini but I found the text and the menu system very small. I had a hard time reading things. The menu is not well defined but after playing around a while I did get a handle on them. I also found the game to run a bit choppy, pinch to zoom and moving around the map seemed a bit awkward. Even after the tutorial I still had some questions.
Now most of this is probably just me. The game has a lot of offer. There are the Tutorial, Free Play, and Campaign mode. You can choose different maps and difficulty settings in free play. When you click on a person you get their name, experience, equipment, and more. The game has a technology tree, statistics, and diplomacy information. This really is a very in depth game and a bit more than what I bargained for. I just could not wrap my head around all of the different aspects of the game. Does that make the game bad? No, not necessarily. It will be interesting to see what others have to say about the game.
If you enjoy civilization building games and ones that offer some complexity to it, then give Cultures Northland for the iPad a try. I would love to hear what you think. (As a side note, I am not going to rate this game since I have some questions. I am going to put it down for a while and come back to it)
