At first glance, Viking Frontiers is the kind of game I tend to steer clear of, resembling a typical job simulator. Cut down trees, smash apart stones, tend to your cabbages, etc. Fortunately, it reveals itself to be more of a survival game. You wake up stranded on a distant island among the ruins of a shipwreck in which your outgoing father, Gunnar Stormrider, found himself caught up in the wake of what amounted to a coup.
It’s down to you to reestablish the clan by building a new settlement and gaining a strategic foothold to eventually vanquish your enemies, first by way of getting a few houses built. You’ll find yourself building on the beach as it’s the first place you’ll find any decent space and to be honest, it’s as good a place as any. Your settlement isn’t affected by storms thankfully, so while it might seem counterintuitive, life’s definitely a beach.
Your first aim upon waking up on an unknown beach is to heal your wounds. At this point you’re gently introduced to the gathering and crafting system. Gathering is pretty self-explanatory, and initial crafting is simply via a fairly intuitive radial menu system.
What isn’t intuitive to begin with is the fact that while you may have unlocked a building blueprint, it isn’t clear that you can’t build without having a hammer equipped. Thankfully, your progress isn’t held up by tech level. For example, a bronze age building can be constructed with stone tools as long as you have the necessary resources.
As you progress, you’ll unlock various levels of technology via a tech tree, though it does feel a little strange to me that you are in a seafaring culture and aren’t able to crack on and build a boat. Nor can you access any tools beyond stone derived items at the beginning, needing to progress quite far before you’re able to access first copper, then bronze and iron tools. It’s not like this is Age of Empires set over multiple historical periods.
At any rate, the gathering aspect and construction of buildings makes this feel a bit like a job simulator with a Viking-era flavour. Across my two weeks with it, I’ve notched up at least twelve hours, yet due to the glacial pace, it feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface here. Perhaps it should be set in an ice age.
The problem with Viking Frontiers isn’t the survival aspect of the gameplay. It’s the fact that the manufacture of items, regeneration of resources like peat and growing of crops proceed at a slow pace. When is a minute is more like three minutes? You’ll find out here. Crops take an age to grow, and any attempt to automate processes to speed up the essential sawmill is also subject to the slow pace. I’m all for automation and putting villagers to work, but when it’s generally quicker to do it yourself, you start to wonder what the point is. That combined with the fact that you never actually see your workers carrying out tasks, makes for a disconnected experience in that regard.
We get that you can’t mine iron with stone tools, but when you can gather peat happily enough with a stone shovel, you have to wait until you have researched and built bronze tools to gather clay. It means that you can’t make clay ovens until you’re at the bronze age stage of the tech tree. Yes, I get that the developers don’t want you to run until you’re able to walk, but the logic feels a bit off.
All the while, it sometimes feels like your actions have no real consequences. If your livestock dies, you’re generally cash rich enough that it doesn’t make much difference outside of the fact that you might end up short of eggs or milk. But you wait for the handy trader to show up and buy the products from him instead.
The gameplay cycle is generally fun enough, at least, though you’re initially limited to just the starting beach area and woodland due to heavy stone cairns that block access to the next area. It feels a bit arbitrary at times, but at least the stronger enemies that lurk behind these barriers have a short memory and won’t pursue you like an Oblivion guard.
You can become overencumbered in the grand fashion of any number of Bethesda games, but offloading in a chest is often the easiest way to resolve this. I wish you could have a shared chest inventory, as sometimes your biggest barrier is remembering where you’ve stashed what resource that you suddenly need.
The survival aspect is governed by your health, hunger, hydration and tiredness. In an interesting turn, if you go to sleep for the default allotted eight hours, you’ll often wake up thirsty and hungry, but I can’t remember the last time I started taking damage from having rested. Thankfully there’s a light vibration blip to let you know, but early on in my gameplay experience with Viking Frontiers, I died while out exploring as I misinterpreted the pulsing as that of my heart rate having been running around the place.
Due to the generally slow pace and somewhat harsh gating of tech, Viking Frontiers can feel a bit like a chore but despite that, it is generally fun. Think of it more as a game to play when you’re catching up on a podcast or having a slow day at work. It’s not the most action packed nor enthralling, but it is alright. And that’s just fine.
Blum Entertainment’s Viking Frontiers is out now on PS5, Xbox Series and PC. Published on consoles by Ultimate Games.