I’ve been following Oskar Stålberg for a while on Twitter and seen this game take form through the video clips that he’s been posting there. From those it looked really fun, and it was an inevitable purchase for me.
This is a tower defence game. Each level is an island that is under attack from evil vikings. Your job is to keep them at bay so they don’t burn down the houses on the island. A simple enough concept.
This is going on in real time, so while you setup the defence for one part of the island, there will be new enemies appearing on the other side. To your disposal you have your heroes of 3 different classes – fighters, pikemen and archers. These have a primary passive attack, and then a special attack that requires you to actively trigger it.
You can slow down time to give yourself a breather, plan your defence, and time the special attacks. As the game goes on, the enemies gets tougher, more plentiful and you will see some really evil bastards.
The art design is really good and the game is very pretty to look at. It runs well on the Nintendo Switch both docked to the TV and handheld. I really like how they adjust the UI to fit the smaller resolution on the handheld. It makes the game much more accessible.
I also like that the game doesn’t require a large commitment from you. You can play an island which takes about 5 minutes and then put it away – or you can binge island after island as I did and easily spend 2 hours with the game. The design of the game makes it really engaging.
There are a couple of caveats. The controls are really strange and I never got really used to them. My hands wants to do things that is not happening on screen and that creates a discrepancy between what is going on in the screen and what I would like to do.
It is really hard to time the special attacks, which leads to me mostly ignoring them as they are not contributing in the defence. After a while the levels starts to feel very much the same and they don’t introduce any new concept or aspect of the game. Instead it is just more of the same, which is a shame because I think that there are possibilities here to build a deeper system of strategies.
The game is not too long and you will finish it in a couple of hours. I had fun all the way and that is what counts.
I rate this game as good.
Replay 