I've been extra late at picking up this year's slate of EA football games. By the time I finally got around to ordering a pre-owned and pre-played copy of College Football 27 (and saved myself over $20 in the process!), Madden had just released. In the meantime, I took another dive into my PS5 and PC backlog. The beneficiary of my PC backlog dive is a colony-builder from a couple years ago named Land of the Vikings.

As the name suggests, this game is a city/colony-builder with a viking theme. Not only are you expected to build a thriving Norse colony, but you'll also have to send ships out to trade with and raid neighboring villages. I was hoping for "Manor Lords, but with vikings". What I got was far less.

Manor Lords with vikings? Sign me up!

Roads less travelled

The greatest strength of Land of the Vikings is that it is a little more expressive than some other colony-builders. First and foremost, it is a grid-less colony-builder, meaning you can place buildings and roads anywhere on the map, at any angle, and the roads can curve organically. This immediately sets this game apart from something like Farthest Frontier, which is constrained to a grid and 90-degree angles, and suffers for it.

Land of the Vikigns also offers a decent number of decorative objects, and these objects even have various functions. This game doesn't have the customizable, modular buildings of Foundation, which is a shame. Being able to at least customize the Longhouse would have been nice. Instead, you'll have to settle for being able to customize your trade ships and warships, which is sadly a feature that I can't review, because it didn't work for me when I played the game. I bought the customization upgrades in the technology tree, but the button to customize my ships was still grayed out in all my docks. So one of the big selling points of the game just flat-out didn't work for me.

Thankfully, the regular decorations did work, and I was able to place these in my village. Decorations are broadly divided into 4 functional categories. Some decorations make villagers happier, others improve the village's defenses, others increase the storage capacity of buildings, and still others make the village appear wealthier. These decorations don't need to be specifically placed next to the buildings that they upgrade, as they can be placed anywhere you want, giving you quite a bit of freedom to make the village look how you want.

There are some disappointing limitations to the decorations. There aren't any chairs, tables, or benches, so I couldn't make any kind of outdoor dining area for my tavern, or any kind of communal hang-out spot outside the Longhouse.

I particularly like the idea of placing signs and banners along roads to speed up movement along those roads. This is a feature that I would love to see implemented in other colony builders. They look nice on their own, but the fact that they actually do make travel along the roads faster and more efficient is a really cool feature.

Signposts, banners, and wagons will speed up movement along roads.

Placing wooden carts along roads also supposedly improves movement speed. Presumably, this is an abstraction for the villager using those carts to move goods. Personally, I would much prefer if the game had a wainwright building to make useable wooden carts and wagons, but I guess I'll take what I can get.

The game also requires that you build torches and braziers to light the village at night, which is an idea that I also really like, and which I think more games like this should employ. Without enough light, villagers will actually complain. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really give any feedback (that I could find) that tells the player where light is needed or how much light should be provided. I was also disappointed that the braziers didn't act as a source of heat to relieve villagers from the cold of winter.

The functionality of decorations gives an element of strategy and planning to how you decorate your village. You also need to put some planning and thought into who is going to work where. Each villager has different ratings for each of 4 different skills, as well as a set of randomized personality traits. The personality traits are easy to forget about or ignore, but the skills determine how efficiently a worker does their job. Some jobs require a single skill, while others can require a combination of 2 skills to be most effective. This would be a really cool system, if not for the fact that it is completely undercut by other under-developed logistical systems (which I'll talk about later).

Furthermore, different types of military units also have different skill requirements. So when you mobilize villagers for raids, you may have to pull them away from certain jobs, unless you have enough general laborers or builders to pull your vikings from.

Your village must be lit at night, or else villagers will complain.

The Northman © Universal Pictures.

The Northman was another Hollywood movie that I wanted to see in theaters but missed. Just like The Last Duel, even if the movie ended up being bad (which they weren't), I wanted to see it in theaters to support the continued production of movies like this -- movies that aren't just another in the endless onslaught of comic book movies and nostalgia reboots from the late 80's and 90's. I want Hollywood to keep making these sorts of serious historic dramas.

But I haven't been to a movie theater in over 2 years thanks to the COVID pandemic. I would have been willing to go to the theaters for this (as well as for The Last Duel), but stuff kept coming up. We kept putting it off until, before we knew it, The Northman was out of theaters. But I'm no hypocrite. I also haven't seen any comic book movies in theaters either. I waited to see Spider-Man: No Way Home and The Batman until they were on streaming, and I still haven't seen Multiverse of Madness.

Much like The Last Duel, Northman is a brutal and dirty movie. Nobody gets blood-eagled, but there is plenty of violence, both grotesque and cathartic. Even the non-violent parts of the movie are grotesque and intense. Grown men built like trucks scream at each other, dance around, and even occasionally cry. This movie is constantly bombarding the audience with weird stuff, and it's all mesmerizing.

Northman threads a fine line between completely believable historical fiction and some mythological elements. On the one hand, I would believe the movie if it told me that it was inspired by true events. On the other hand, it's never entirely clear if the mythological content is actually supposed to be interpreted as really happening, of if they simply reflect the characters' belief in their gods and magics. Either way, the gritty, dirty, realistic settings are occasionally juxtaposed with beautiful and imaginative fantastical imagery.

© Universal Pictures

© Universal Pictures

The gritty, realistic setting is juxtaposed with imaginative fantastical imagery.

One of the thoughts that dominated my playtime with Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag was "Oh I hope the next game is a viking-themed game!". I felt that the open-ended sailing and naval combat would work well in a viking setting, complete with raiding coastal villages as an extra way of obtaining wealth and loot (in addition to plundering trade ships in the open sea). Black Flag was so good, it seemed like a sure-fire, slam-dunk idea! What could possibly go wrong?

Well, it turns out: almost everything could go wrong.

I've been hoping for a viking-themed game ever since Black Flag.

For starters, I refused to buy Assassin's Creed: Valhalla at its release because I did not want to give any money to Ubisoft, which has had ongoing legal issues regarding multiple sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations against high-level managers and executives. Like the Catholic Church, Ubisoft may have systematically hid these alleged transgressions and protected the executives who were committing them. Even the company's HR department has been accused of being complicit.

So fuck Ubisoft and its executives, who (if these allegations are true) should all be in prison, and the company's ownership should be given to the employees who were wronged. I wasn't going to give that company a dime of my money, so I waited and watched eBay for cheaper, used copies to show up. I specifically filtered for "used" copies -- none of that "new, sealed" wholesale scalping nonsense that is all over eBay. Buying a sealed copy from an eBay scalper is the same as buying a new, retail copy, as far as I'm concerned. Several months after release, I finally bought a cheap, used copy for about $30 from someone who claimed to have played the game and got bored of it, so that my partner could kill time while stuck at home during the ongoing pandemic in 2021.

She played through the entire game, and liked it just fine. I played a little bit, hated the early hours, and stopped playing it so that I could work on other projects. I only came back to it later (after she had finished) to see if the game had any redeeming qualities. And even then, I did not even come close to completing the game because it's just too damn long, and I have much better things to do with my time.

You had one job, Valhalla! And you couldn't even get that right!

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla is a tedious, repetitive, drawn-out, copy-pasted, glitch-laden, slog of a game and story. It tries to copy the one thing that Black Flag did so well, and which inspired all future sailing mechanics for every Assassin's Creed game that followed, but it actually somehow manages to remove that thing! That's right, there is no naval combat in the game at all. Worse yet, there is absolutely nothing to do with the longship except use it as a vehicle for moving about the empty, sterile seas and rivers. There isn't even much in the way of islands to discover out in the open seas, so even the exploration incentive is gone. The Norway map has a few islands, but the England map has virtually none. In fact, you don't even use the longship to sail the seas around England; you only use it to sail up and down rivers looking for villages to raid. The key selling point of Valhalla, the longship, is nothing more than a glorified truck, and the rivers that run across England are basically just roads.

The longship is little more than a truck, and the rivers are little more than roads between raids.

Things are spaced out a bit more than I usually expect from an Assassin's Creed game. The map isn't quite as littered with mindless collectibles, even though it is still littered with mindless collectibles. But the map still isn't quite big enough, the distances still not quite far enough, and fast travel is still accessible enough, that I never felt it necessary to use the boat as the most efficient method of traversal. If you're stopping at every village to raid, to search for every collectible, and to play every side quest, then you're better off just using your horse, because any time you would save from using the boat will be offset by the extra time it takes to board and unboard the thing everytime you stop for a side quest.

It's like Ubisoft took the castle sieges from Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, stripped out the Nemesis system that gave those sieges context that made them worth playing, and then just put rivers between all the castle gates so you'd have an excuse to attack from the boat. But the longship feels completely unnecessary to the game. Early in the game, the longship feels like it might be a more integral part of the game, when you're sailing around the seas, fjords, and snaky coastlines of Norway, and crossing large bodies of water is necessary. But then you get to England, and the map is almost completely land-locked, save for those traversable rivers.

Now that I've covered all the civilizations which are new to the Civ franchise in the Gathering Storm expansion, I'm going to cover the other civs that my Patrons voted on. This guide will be for Viking King Harald Hardrada of Norway. Norway was included in the vanilla release of Civilization VI, but the strategies for playing as them (and all militaristic civs) changed considerably due to the loyalty mechanics introduced in the first expansion, Rise & Fall. The leader, Harald Hardrada, also had his Thunderbolt of the North ability enhanced by the Gathering Storm expansion.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, migration out of the former Roman territories lead to a growth in population of the Scandinavian regions as the Medieval Warm Period made the frigid northern lands more amenable to agriculture. As populations grew, resources became scarce and piracy grew. The clans of Scandinavia began creating local or regional assemblies called "things", with the purpose of making laws, settling disputes, and directing the activity of pirates to territories outside of Scandinavia, eventually leading to a seasonal, sea-faring raiding culture. In 793 A.D., Norse raiders pillaged the English Catholic monastery at Lindisfarne, and kick-started the "Age of Vikings". Viking seafarers developed remarkably sea-worthy boats that allowed them to explore and colonize parts of the English isles, Iceland, Greenland, the Mediterranean, and they are even believed to have founded a short-lived colony in modern Canada.

The death of Harald Sigurdsson at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in England is often cited as marking the end of the Viking Age. Harald accumulated great wealth during his youth as a Byzantine Varangian Guard (a group of elite soldiers recruited from Northern Europe to protect the Eastern Roman Emperor). Upon returning to Norway, Harald inherited the throne from his nephew Magnus, and went on to unite Norway and institute a singular coinage economy that allowed Norway to enter into international trade. He earned the nickname "Hardrada" ("the hard ruler") for his stern rule, and propensity for using violence to put down internal opposition. He spent much of his life trying (unsuccessfully) to conquer Denmark before finally turning his attention to his fateful invasion of England.

DISCLAIMER:
Civilization VI is still a "living game". Strategies for the game (and for specific leaders and civs) may change as Firaxis applies balance patches, introduces new features, or expands the game through further DLC or expansion packs, or as the Civ community discovers new strategies or exploits. As such, the following strategy guide may change from time to time. I will try to keep it up-to-date, and will make notations whenever changes are made. I'll also post links in the official 2K forums and CivFanatics, where I'll also report any changes made. If possible and practical, I will try to retain the original content of the strategy for posterity.

I welcome any feedback or suggestions that readers wish to offer. Feel free to post on the linked forums, or by posting a comment at the bottom of the page.

This guide is up to date as of the release of the Gathering Storm expansion's "Red Death" (September 2019) (ver. 1.0.0.341)

Norway is an aggressive ocean-faring civilization that gets strong bonuses for raiding and pillaging. Their naval units can enter ocean tiles earlier in the game, allowing them to partially explore and settle other continents and meet distant civilizations sooner in the game.

Vikings and norse mythology seems to have been a popular concept in games recently. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, for instance, is an excellent hack-n-slash adventure through Norse hell. I've also been playing the Wasteland-like RPG Expeditions: Vikings on Steam (which I'm hoping to review soon). I also have games like Mount & Blad: Viking Conquest and Total War: Thrones of Britannia on my short list of games I'd like to play. And there was also the Viking character in For Honor.

Now, Sony's PlayStation flagship God of War has jumped from Greek mythology to Norse mythology. Having killed all the Greek gods, Kratos has apparently settled down in the mythological Midgard with a wife and son, only for his wife to die and his son be attacked by the Norse god Baldr. This sends Kratos and Atreus on a father-son bonding adventure to spread Atreus' mother's ashes from the highest peak in all the realms, and to learn why the Aesir are suddenly keen on hunting them.

Norse mythology seems to be a popular subject in media lately.

A father-son murder team

Atreus has some of the same problems that The Last of Us has with Ellie. Atreus doesn't feel vulnerable enough to demand protection, and he's rarely relevant outside of combat, except for his running commentary about what you're doing. Because of this, the actual game rarely feels like it's about protecting or escorting Atreus. And even though the game is ostensibly about Kratos teaching Atreus how to fight and be a man, the player never has an opportunity to actually teach the kid or take on any parental responsibility for him. It's just about Kratos throwing axes at draugr, and Atreus occasionally shoots them or jumps on their heads to help you out. The puzzle sections rarely require using Atreus (other than occasionally shooting something with his bow or having him scamper through a small tunnel).

Atreus is basically just an extra ranged attack.

That being said, I think that God of War makes some strides in the right direction (compared to The Last of Us). The player (and Kratos) can command Atreus to attack a target with his bow, which is one of the easiest and most consistent ways to deal stun damage to enemies, which opens them up to an intant-kill attack from Kratos. It's also a strategy that is pretty much essential on the harder difficulties. This creates a much greater sense of playing in tandem with Atreus, as he and Kratos often work together to defeat foes.

Atreus and Kratos can also break each other out of being grappled or stunned. I've never gotten a "Game Over" as a result of Atreus being defeated, so I'm not sure if that's a possible fail state. Being grappled or stunned only seemed to ever temporarily take Atreus out of the fight and negate the ability to use his bow. Either way, this is an improvement over Ellie from The Last of Us, who (as far as I recall) operated entirely independently from Joel, was never at any risk, and could be completely ignored for most of the player's time actually playing the game.

Kratos and Atreus can break each other out of enemy grapples and support each other in combat.

The important take-away here is that, unlike with Ellie in the combat encounters of The Last of Us, I never forgot that Atreus was there when playing God of War...