Frozenheim Review Explore And Build Your Norse Kingdom

Paranoid Interactive recently released their newest RTS game set in Norse history and mythology with Frozenheim. With the May release, we finally got our hands on the RTS title and took a look at the Paranoid Interactive game. Find out how it is with our review of Frozenheim.

Story: Follow Norse heroes as they make their claim

With their v1.0 update, Frozenheim now has six different campaign scenarios with an endgame scenario. Each will follow a different person along with their arc, leading them to create their Norse kingdom. Each of their campaign arcs will contain several missions order to complete. Some of them will have you building a village, delivering goods, and capturing runestones.

During our review of Frozenheim, we found that the campaign’s pacing is a little slow, with each mission taking up quite a bit of time to complete. The pacing may not be for those who are looking for something that will take up a little less of their time. Even if the campaign isn’t your thing, Frozeheim still has other game modes to offer.

Gameplay

Frozenheim offers players a custom scenario game mode with a survival, skirmish, and city-building mode types. With these modes, players will begin their construction of a Norse kingdom starting from square one.

Survival will have players struggling to build their villages during constant waves of enemies. Skirmish will allow players to choose from a selection of prepared or generated maps along with the amount of AI players to set our for victory together or alone. Lastly, the city-building mode, which let players build their villages will little hassle to master the process of building a successful village. These modes can be altered somewhat, with a handful of minor adjustments per each.

Like many other games like Frozenheim, the start of the game will require players to gather resources which is an essential game mechanic. But, unlike other games, these mechanics are more basic, only needing to drop the location, set your staff, and the location of harvest. Fulfilling your resource needs will give you access to facilities you can construct.

These facilities will require particular resources and placement for each to be built and function. At your disposal is a moderate selection of facilities ranging from resource gather, troop building, and general benefits. Unfortunately, Frozenheim doesn’t offer much diversity in their buildings, with troop creation all in one building and little in the way of village defense outside troops at this time. However, some facilities do offer the ability to be upgraded, adding bonuses to village stats.

Build your Norse kingdom and seek out the victory in this indie RTS

Improving your facilities, troops, and general stats like much of the rest of Frozenheim isn’t as deep compared to other RTS games. Two facilities will offer direct upgrades to the village and troops with the elder’s hut and weaponsmith. There are general building upgrades for the Jarl’s homestead and residencies. Upgrading your homestead is like advancing age in Age of Empires, unlocking additional buildings to construct. Upgrading your houses will improve citizen generation, increasing the number of citizens in your village, which can be used for gathering and troop construction.

This leads us into combat which in Frozenheim offers both a bit of innovation and difficulty. Moving your troops is the same of what you’d find in any other RTS game. Simply point and click, and your troops will move, but the team at Paranoid Interactive has added a formation function as well to the mouse. By holding and dragging the mouse, the player can place their units into a different formation.

The five basic units each have an individual skill or two, along with the unique siege units that can be recruited with unique buildings or upgrades. Unfortunately, the AI in Forzeheim is lacking, with units having poor navigation and losing troops across the map who would get stuck during transit. In addition, scouts have no auto-explore feature that allows them to traverse the map. You’ll have to keep tabs on them.

Graphics/Audio: A beautifully crafted world that can sometimes get in the way

During our review of Frozenheim we got to see a beautifully crafted world with pleasant summers and raging winters that will be to the benefit or detriment to players. Unfortunately, with a handful of maps, players may notice a lack of diversity with biome type, forested mountains with deep valleys are pretty much the layout of Frozenheim. But with patch v1.0, the variety has been extended a bit, adding an experimental randomly generated map that players can select outside of the premade maps.

Players will utilize a commonly used camera style in RTS games to look around this world crafted by the Paranoid Interactive team. The scrollable camera that allows some zooming and rotating operates most of the time as it should but sometimes becomes cumbersome. This especially happens when trying to follow moving units around the map, with the camera getting caught by terrain. The UI can also be problematic at times as well, with floating icons getting in the way while building and selecting. In addition, clicking buildings doesn’t always register with unit attacks or movements.

The developers have already begun to address these issues with the 1.0 release patch. These are the only persisting issues that will likely be addressed with the next patch. The team at Paranoid Interactive has done fantastic work so far, fixing the problems that have come up since the release of Frozenheim, which is even more impressive coming from a development team with less than ten members.

Conclusion: Even with the rough edges, it’s a game that shows promise

Frozenheim is a promising indie game from the small team Paranoid Interactive from Warsaw. While it lacks a bit of polish, the developers are actively working on the game and quickly delivering updates. Frozenheim is an RTS worth checking out and following into the future. After reading our Frozenheim review, you can pick up Frozenheim on their Steam product page for $19.99. Lastly, you can head over to the Paranoid Interactive website to learn more about the devs or follow any of their other projects.