Northgard 9+

It’s expensive but it’s worth it. You simply don’t get this quality gameplay in the free market. Northgard combines a great story with some very replayable sandbox modes that see you coming back for more to master different modes and clans. It’s ideal for Age of Empires and Outlanders fans alike. The gameplay is fantastic - perfect for fans of survivor and town builder games but with an added combat element, against both enemy AI and random events (not to mention multiplayer). The zone system is fresh and makes expanding your territory rewarding and challenging at times, forcing you to make decisions about which resources you need most or how best to protect your borders. Combined with a meaningful research tree this makes for a great sense of progression in all modes. For the price I hope to see regular updates to keep this fresh, particularly to fix some crashing and sound issues, but even as an out-the-box game this will keep me coming back for some time.

Edit: great to see some updates still coming but if anything they have made the game less stable. The menus in particular are so buggy and often cause crashes. I hope to see some improvements there.

At AU$11, you don’t expect a ton from a game, but I was seriously impressed by this game.

Since the concept of the iPad had been announced, the one type of game I have wanted on it above all else is RTS of this style, Age Of Empires/Classic Warcraft but every other developer made junky clones with every mechanic tied in to microtransactions. I’m very glad to say this is NOT that kind of game in the slightest!

This game harkens back to the golden age of early RTS, it has smooth touch friendly mechanics, a decent and coherent story, challenging but fair gameplay and enough single player story to justify its price tag.

There are issues; I’ve run into numerous audio glitches, especially late in the game, a couple of minor crashes (but auto save rescued me each time) there’s no way to jump ahead in the narration of cutscenes either which are just a touch too slow for native English speakers.

But other than these this was thoroughly enjoyable. I really hope that future updates will include story DLC (as I have no interest in extra clans) as there’s an enormous amount of untouched scenarios just waiting.

If you need a TL;DR? If you liked Age of Empires, play this game!

Everything about this game makes it a really interesting and fun RTS for iPad. I spend a lot of hours on it and enjoy it thoroughly. The recent major update addressed a lot of pain points and added even more features and variety to a very enjoyable game.
Only 2 suggestions for improvement. Crashing - the game pretty much crashes after around 30 mins of play on a recent iPad Air. This has happened since I bought the game a couple of years back. You need to either save often or rely on the auto save.
End of game statistics only show the stats since the last load - so unless you play the entire game in one go and if the game didn’t experience any crashes, you don’t get to see the stats for the full match, which is a real shame.
Still highly recommend it, hope the devs can address the crashing and stats readout.