Mind The Vikings – A Very, Very Early Alpha Preview

Mind the Vikings is a very (very) new game by small indie developer Idyl. It is so new that you probably have no idea what this game is or what it’s about. But, not to fear! For we at the Zombie Chimp have discovered all there is to discover in the world of vikings. From recruiting new vikings to building your own perfect village. It may only be in early development but this game already has so much potential.

Build your village

So, first things first, this game has very little to play around with right now. It does definitely throw you straight into the thick of it but it is fairly simple to pick up. You first need to build a town hall. This is where you can “hire” your vikings. Each viking is different and can offer different things to your town but we’ll talk more about that later. Once you have your first viking you can start to build other things within your village. Of course, you need to build them somewhere to live. But, after that you can start building other aspects. For example, you can build a farm to harvest crops in order to feed your hungry vikings. Or, you can build a workshop where your vikings can learn to build better tools.

All of this already has a lot of potential. As I was starting to build my village, I was thinking about all the prospects that they could add in terms of gameplay. The buildings are quite limited at the moment, but it would be great to see them add an upgrade system. This would mean as your vikings level up, they can upgrade their houses and work buildings. in turn, this could mean that each building gives a certain boost to your village. There may only be a few buildings at the moment, but already, they have a great start.

Grow the population

Building things is one thing but you can’t really do much unless you have Vikings to mind. This is when another cool feature comes into play. Once your town hall is built, you will start to get “requests” to live in your village. Each Viking has their own particular set of traits that make them unique. This was something that I thought had a lot of potential for some great gameplay. Some examples of traits are: Strong, Resilient, Weak, Lazy, Fast and Slow. There are some other ones too and I presume that the developers will be adding more at some point but its a good start.

However, the more people you have in your village, the more likely they are to fight. This is when you need to start building guard towers. It is a well known fact (probably) that vikings love to fight so every once in a while, vikings from different clans will start to brawl. It is pretty easy to break them up and especially once you have a few guard towers built, it isn’t so hard to handle.

Gather Resources

So, to continue the point I was making before, having these different traits in your vikings could make for some interesting gameplay. These traits or characteristics could come into play depending on the type of job you give them. As you may expect, Mind the Vikings is also a resource management game. At the moment, the three major resources are wood, stone and food. All of these things need to stay in large numbers in order for your vikings to be happy.

Therefore, the trait system would be great if it could play into this. For example, it would be great if each trait made them better or worse at their particular job. At the moment, you can assign any viking to any job and they will do it. But, what would make it even better would be if you gave them a job they weren’t very good at or hated, then this could effect the economy of your village. This would make it more challenging for the player as they would need to consider this when assigning jobs.

A Few Issues

Of course, this game is not perfect but remember, it is very early alpha. It is in a playable state there just isn’t a huge amount to do right now. I didn’t really come across any major issues in terms of performance which is always a good sign. The only thing that I did find was that occasionally when I would assign someone to a job, they would bug out and end up just freezing. I could still pick them up but I couldn’t actually make them do anything else. I also had an issue with trying to remove buildings, whereby I couldn’t.

But, I can’t really begrudge the developers that. So far, they’ve done a really good job with this game and I can’t wait to see what else they are going to do with it. You can buy Mind the Vikings now on Steam, but for the price it is currently you may want to wait until they have developed it further. Definitely keep an eye on this one though, because I see big things for it in the future!