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| Northland: Northland Preview |
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Well I sat down a few days ago to play the demo of Northland. Sadly, I didn't walk away with a very favorable first impression. Let's start off by saying a bit about the game. Northland is a sequel to the game Cultures 2 - The Gates of Asgard. So Northland is actually the third game in the Cultures series. Northland is an 'adventure strategy' game. You take on the role of the young Viking Bjorn as you and your companions attempt to stop the schemes of the outcast god Loki. You'd hope the gameplay would be something akin to Warcraft III since they call it an 'adventure strategy', but any such hopes are quickly dashed by a game that plods along at a snail's pace and suffers from some poor performance issues.
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Let's start off by talking about the performance problems. My PC exceeded all of the recommended specs by quite a bit, and yet whenever I tried to look around the game field, I could do so only with an extremely choppy frame rate. The game continued to perform sluggishly if there were even a remotely interesting number of objects on the screen. I had to turn the graphics down to 800x600 resolution with 16-bit colors before it would run smoothly. Oh yes, did I mention the game is entirely 2-D? I don't have anything against 2-D games, but I think we are past the point of a game composed entirely of sprites running slowly on even less than cutting edge gaming PCs. Now this may very well be something they fix before the game is released and it better.
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The game is pretty; I'll have to give it that. It gets harder and harder to wow players with 2-D sprites in this day and age of anti-aliased 3-D Jedis covered in bump-mapped clothing and jumping through hoops created with per-pixel shaders, but the folks at Funatics Software apparently have some top notch artists and created a 2-D Viking world with more character than many drab lifeless 3-D worlds you can find on the shelves. Oops, did I say Jedis? Why yes, I think I did.
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Another small problem I have with the game thus far is the tutorial. This is a game that can get pretty involved, so the tutorial covers a lot of material. Unfortunately, it is a separate set of missions that seem to have nothing to do with the rest of the game and are a real bore to play. Tutorials are best when you integrate them into the story and flow of the game. At the moment, Northland is an extremely pretty game with potential, but unless they pick up the pacing of the game a bit and make the tutorial more interesting to play, only die-hard strategy or Cultures fans should give it a second thought.
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-Alucard, GameVortex Communications AKA Stephen Triche |
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