Tribes of Midgard – -apkrig
The Vikings are on course. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla started it, and before we continued, the spring survival hit Valheim arrived, the action platformer Song of Iron is in preparation, and last but not least, we released the Tribes of Midgard, a game that mixes survival in an irreconcilable world with roguelike, or even with tower defense elements. But sometimes this mish-mash squeaks quite seriously at times.
At the very beginning, it is worth saying that Tribes of Midgard is far better to play in a group than solo. Although playing together brings its own pitfalls, which we will talk more about later, on the one hand, playing in greater numbers is much more fun, on the other hand, the solo mode is unnecessarily frustrating in the later stages. So if you don’t have friends and don’t want to play with random strangers through (very well-functioning) matchmaking, I’d rather recommend that you look elsewhere for your playing luck. Soloing is possible but not optimal. After all, the game is called Tribes of Midgard and not Loners of Midgard, that.
In the game, you become an einherjar, a hero who already had his place in Valhalla but had to return to Midgard. Evil monsters and ice giants are threatening the very seeds of the legendary Yggdrasil tree, and it is up to you to ward off this threat with fire and sword. The well-known old carousel of collecting material, improving equipment and character, and of course building, will help you with this.
There are two game modes, the so-called Saga, where your task is to survive a hundred days, and also the endless Survival, where it is just a matter of lasting as long as possible. Both modes are, as I have already indicated, available solo or with others, but the latter is practically useless for a lone hero.
Once launched, you will be greeted by a procedurally generated and relatively large world. It is divided into a number of different biomes that bring their own challenges, whether it’s heat in the desert or logically frost in the mountains. You have to adapt your equipment to this, because a sweaty or frozen viking can’t do much.
At the beginning, you choose a hero class with various bonuses and your first task will be to collect material so that you do not have to deal with local dangers with your bare hands. Over time, your hero gets stronger, unlocks new skills and gets better equipment, but he shouldn’t get used to them, because roguelike gameplay is irreconcilable. Once you die, you will drive nicely from the beginning.
As is customary in the genre, apart from outlining the basic plot premise, the Tribes of Midgard do not linger in any way and place the main emphasis on playability. Tiny snippets of the story background can be found in the descriptions of the objects, but if you would like to enjoy a real Nordic saga with everything, you have to look elsewhere. In general, it’s a little funny that the game puts you in the role of a heroic warrior, but most of the time you feel more like a struggling bug that is never done.
As night falls, evil bishops will wander into your base in an attempt to shatter the tree of life. Duels, which should be one of the main game mechanisms (because there are a lot of them in the game), are unfortunately, unlike most action RPGs, extremely flat and fun, in most cases you just need to crush a single button, moreover, unfortunately you can not talk about any major differences between the individual weapons.
Most enemies do not require any special tactics and try to defeat you in numbers. Ice giants are a slightly different story, if you play cooperatively, the player himself has practically no chance to defeat the monster himself and must rely on the help of up to nine colleagues. Giants are different, they control different types of elements and magic, and in addition to them, you will also meet a number of bosses in the game. The game counts on the system of seasons, the current first Saga ends with a duel with the wolf Fenrir and I must say that I quite enjoyed it.
Probably the biggest problem is that the Tribes of Midgard tries to combine several genres, but they don’t work very well together, or rather they can really bother the player. As in other survival, you don’t have to worry about basic necessities, such as food or drink, but every attempt in the Saga mode is, in my opinion, too long for the roguelike restriction to be too annoying.
Players have become accustomed to dying in games thanks to a number of titles, but it is good if every attempt, despite its potential shortness, can bring some lasting reward. A great example in this regard is last year’s phenomenal Hades, or the older Rogue Legacy or my favorite Dead Cells. In Tribes of Midgard, you will lose all collected material after death, but you can return to the place of death for him, following the example of Dark Souls. But you will irreversibly lose all souls, a rare universal currency. Which isn’t even the worst thing that can happen to you.
The end in the form of the destruction of Yggdrasil is definitive and you start again nicely from scratch, at most with a new player experience, or some fulfilled challenge. Given that one run can take about three hours, this math is simply relentlessly deadly. The authors try to save this problem with Battle Pass, thanks to which you can unlock cosmetic items or so-called starter packs with a pre-prepared loadout, but this is not a sufficient solution.
The second big snag that manifests itself in playing together is the noticeable lack of rare materials needed at a later stage of the game. This leads to players cheering on found items for themselves instead of supporting joint efforts, which, especially when playing with strangers, leads to annoyed stretched faces.
The biggest problem with Tribes of Midgard is that their, in Moravian, core gameplay loop runs out too soon. For example, such a Valheim, which at first glance seems much more rude, finally managed to pin me to the screen for long hours and made me overcome the repeated loss of rare equipment in a seemingly inaccessible place at the other end of the map. Despite this, my Viking and I again collected materials for the basic raft and set out to meet the uncertainty in the turbulent waves.
Tribes of Midgard boasts handsome, brightly colored Celshad stylization and pleasant music, but they fail in the basics. In building the world you want to subdue with your tenacity and diligence. If the combat system was at least a little more interesting, if the authors left us at least something significant after each run …
Despite these criticisms, I have no doubt that the game will find its supporters, either because of the friendly price or because the survivals are dragging on and some trouble is lost in a group of friends and swallowing time together in a magical mythical environment probably works.
So there is a game in front of us, which is definitely not bad, but it is not good enough for me to recommend it to you with a calm heart. Personally, I will probably never return to this Midgard unless the authors make some major changes to the gameplay. My next Viking adventure will rather take place in the rhythm of the Iron Song.
