However, the resources these Vikings harvest aren't immediately usable. You'll need to make another Viking a woodcutter so that he can go off to find wood in a forest. This means that you'll need to take one of your Vikings, change his job to clay extractor, and then send him off to harvest clay. To do this, you'll need a supply of clay and wood. The problem with the game is that it forces you to perform so many mundane tasks to accomplish things that most RTS players take for granted.įor example, one of the first things you'll want to do is create a farm. Your goal is to try to establish a settlement that includes a headquarters (or city center), farms, houses, barracks, and special-crafts buildings, like stonemason shops, mills, bakeries, and smiths. In most scenarios, you'll start from scratch with a band of Vikings. The game seems to be something of a fusion between a city-building game, a standard RTS, and a life simulation, like The Sims.
Structures look blocky, and you can easily lose track of your characters behind buildings or in dense forests because these don't seem to become transparent when characters move behind them.Īs far as the gameplay is concerned, Northland can be summed up in one word: tedious. While the visuals have some charm in an artistic sense, on a technical level, Northland's graphics fall short of most modern RTS games. The characters in the game are cartoony the landscape includes a lot of greenery and animals and everything looks cheery and colorful, with a vibrant palette. Northland uses the same 2D, isometric graphics engine as 2002's Cultures 2. Thankfully, a useful set of tutorial missions is included to help ease players into Northland's interface. Those who are new to the series, however, may feel intimidated at the outset by the seemingly dozens of buttons and info boxes that pop up anytime you click on something. The graphics and interface are just about identical, so longtime fans will feel right at home. Once in the game, Cultures veterans will find that not a whole lot looks different in Northland from Cultures 2. Only by going into our video card properties and disabling DirectDraw and Direct3D acceleration were we able to play Northland. With some more research, we finally discovered a work-around to the problem on an ATI-enthusiast site. After combing through the game forums, we learned that this issue seems to afflict all recent ATI Radeon cards, including the 9500, 9600, 9700, and 9800 series.
Tails of iron woodcutter Patch#
Unfortunately, there's currently no patch for the game, nor is there any troubleshooting information. Launching the game would allow us to view the opening cinematic, and then we were dumped to a black screen that presented us with just a cursor. When we first got our Northland disc, we were unable to load the game properly. A handful of multiplayer levels are also included, but there's no true matchmaking service available, and the LAN games we attempted were unstable. 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. As a result, he calls upon his friends for help. After saving the world in Cultures 2, Hachi and Sigurd have returned to their homelands, but Hachi soon finds that his homeland is overrun by enemies.
Northland follows the story of a wandering band of Vikings, led by a quartet of heroes named Bjarni (son of the famous explorer Leif Ericsson), his lover Cyra, and their friends Hachi and Sigurd. It takes a while to make heads or tails out of all of these buttons. A showstopping technical glitch that affects ATI cards may keep some players from even loading the game at all.
Tails of iron woodcutter series#
However, those who are new to the series may not get past Northland's dated graphics engine or game design, which hasn't evolved with the rest of the RTS genre. The game offers a lot of content and is sure to keep hardcore Cultures fans busy for quite a while. Northland, the third game in the Cultures real-time strategy series, has finally been released in North America, after shipping last summer in Europe.
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