Heil ok sæl!
This is an amazing RPG. Tho, a very combat focused one. If you're the kind of person who only ever wants to play pacifistically and solve everything by dialogue, don't even bother reading any further.
But if you like hitting things with your axes, this is an amazing game to do it in. The encounters are mostly very well designed (There are virtually no random encounters, i had two throughout 25 Hours of play) and the combat is fun. Seeing arrows flying into someones face or being blocked by a shield feels and looks very well.
The combat got enough depth to be challenging, and good lord, some fights can be extremely challenging, but it's not quite extraordinair. Sometimes you'lll still find yourself hitting things rather mindless, like when raiding a church full of civilians.
Which brings me to the next point, killing civilians.
The game is rather sandboxy in its main quest and allows for a lot of different routes to go down on. The basic premise is that you, new appointed thegn of your families viking clan, are deemed a weak ruler and have to defend yourself and your clan in the next althing at the end of the year. In order to gain strength and propserity you seek out the british isles, while running against a (not very pressuring) clock.
But what you do there is entirely up to you. Try to establish trade routes with the kingdom, raise an army and conquere britain, be part of political schemes in order to gain alliances or just raid, murder and pillage everything and build a strong clan with all your money.
I, Hegdor, and my crew from the warship Mabufudyne decided to reinstall a new king in the kingdom of Northumbria, wage war with the picts of the north in his name and make the entirey of britain my ally in the process.
The game is extremely reactive in how you do about things. This also includes fail states! More often than not, losing in a fight does not mean the end of the game, but a new, different outcome to your quests and a different story progress resulting out of it. All RPG's should be like this.
In addition to that, the game also allows you to toggle the lethality of your attacks in a fight. It's entirely up to you wether you want to kill or only defeat the enemy. Even this can sometimes, tho not always, make major or minor impacts on your quest progress.
The third major gameplay pillar of the game is the camping. When traversing the world, your party will get fatigued and hungry which forces you to rest in a camp, as your party will become weak and fragile.
The camping allowes you to give all of your party different tasks for different shifts, such as guarding the camp - to prevent being attacked by wolfs and such in the night -, healing Injuries, hunting, cooking and a lot more. It's a very integral part of the game and it's worth having party members specialised in different camping skills as otherwise you're quickly going to run out of food or medicine and will slowly wither away.
Basically, it's more of Expeditions: Conquistador, but with a new setting. If you like one you're going to like the other.
Very highly recommended for everybody that likes turn based strategy and RPG's.
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