Ever wanted to build your own royal dynasty? Norland gives you a chance, combining familiar colony sim mechanics with a focus on building your own royal lineage through cooperation or domination of neighboring kingdoms. With a solid mechanical base set up alongside some interesting original lore, Norland is already showing promise even in its early access state.
Norland draws heavily from RimWorld, as is obvious from the game’s presentation and from the developers’ upfrontness.
If you’ve played RimWorld, a lot of the game’s core mechanisms are going to be pretty easy to understand. Your people (or Pawns) have basic needs, like food, recreation, and rest, as well as more advanced desires based on randomly assigned personality traits. Therefore, your first and primary job is to produce enough food to keep your citizens from starving and make your population happy.
One way in which Norland separates itself from its RimWorld inspiration is that you can only control your immediate family, the nobles who run your nation. This creates a degree of separation between your characters and the people they rule over. Your citizens are still responsible for chopping wood, brewing alcohol, and every other aspect of your economy, but they can never be directly controlled.
Since you can’t select any of your citizens and manually command them to chop wood or work at a workstation like you can in RimWorld, the game puts more of an actual reliance on work schedules, the economy, and the health and wellbeing of your citizens. You can’t build an empire on the back of one manually controlled pawn. You work to death; you have to keep your citizenry from rebelling or starving to death to keep your population growing.
Not having to micromanage every worker in your nation allows you to build much larger kingdoms with less hassle than in a game like RimWorld. The only management that needs to be done to get a resource harvested is to assign one of your nobles to a production building. Each noble can manage about seven buildings and only has to issue a work order to each one every seven days. Kind of the ideal job, if you ask me.
Norland features a pretty robust economy, with the player managing an internal and external trade system. Players must pay their citizens to produce goods, some of which they sell back to citizens at their own prices. At the same time, a wandering trader visits your settlement once every three days, selling and buying goods based on a supply and demand rate mostly outside of your control.
A game about royalty would be nothing without political intrigue, which Norland has plenty of due to its world map. Each region on the map belongs to another King, who can be your ally, enemy, or vassal. Kings and Queens will constantly fight each other, and you can intervene in wars, invade yourself, or even form political marriages with your family members. Childbirth and family lineage are a big part of the game, clearly inviting you to spend multiple generations on your quest to reform the lost empire.
The game also features some surprisingly interesting lore, especially with the church and the legion of the dead serving as antagonistic forces that can be used to your advantage or outright fought when no other option presents itself.
One of my favorite aspects of the game has to be how it handles research and education. Certain buildings are locked behind research, which you have to study through books you purchase from the church. Interestingly, when a character dies, that knowledge dies with them. This means that as your heir is being raised, you’re incentivized to have them study all the books stored in your library. This gives a realistic reason why you would educate your children and makes doing so useful.
I also enjoy the way the game handles character creation. When selecting your starting family, you’re given the choice of customizing your skills, and rather than just giving you a flat point limit, each increase to a skill increases your character’s starting age. This is a cool way to balance having a highly skilled character by making their actual time spent on the map much shorter than others.
There aren’t many bugs or things I’d like to see changed. The game locks up a bit when autosaving, but I haven’t experienced any bugs that I can recall, nor have I experienced any crashes to the desktop.
Instead of using RimWorld’s freeform base design, which allows you to place blocks to form buildings and workbenches anywhere you’d like, Norland relegates all the building to peaceable, complete buildings. You just put them down, and you’re done. I’m not totally sure how I feel about this; in the same way, it certainly looks better than RimWorld, even if it takes some player freedom away. I would, however, like to see the building list expanded with more alternate versions of the peaceable buildings. Right now, they’re limited to the single version, and that kind of bums me out.
Overall, Norland is in a really solid place, even in its Early Access release. It has a solid grasp on what makes games like RimWorld, its main inspiration, fun, and adds to the formula with interesting diplomatic and lineage-building systems. It has cool, unique lore, nice graphics, a robust economy system, and well-polished, if not incredibly deep, combat mechanics. For anyone looking for a new colony sim, Norland certainly serves as a worthy contender on the market.
Pros:
- Solid colony sim / simulator mechanics
- Interesting diplomacy and family building gameplay, putting you in the shoes of a royal lineage
- A robust economy simulation
Cons:
- Something of a lack of variety when it comes to the city-building and structures available
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