Northgard vs Rend
Northgard
Northgard is a rather unique city-builder/strategy game that allows you to lead a group of Northmen to unknown new shores in hopes of making a life there. Like most city-building games, you'll need to help them set up a home, assign your Vikings to perform various roles, ensure there is enough food to feed the entire village, and amass a small army to help defend your territories from other hostile clans. The strategic aspects of the game may not be obvious at first but you'll quickly realize that new territories that you discover (you don't exactly need to conquer it for this to work) will present new strategic opportunities for your clan to expand or grow, be it new sources for food or a nice place to set up a new trading post. There are many victory conditions as well, so it's not always "kill or be killed" in this game.Northgard offers players a single player experience by playing with AIs with various personalities or with their friends online. However, many players have reported that the game does have a somewhat flawed AI-player relationship. Even if you're best buddies with an AI's clan through healthy trading relationships, their clan members will still attack your people, which frankly feels a lot like a betrayal. It'd be nice to have a tutorial as well.
That said though, Northgard is an impressive game especially if you enjoy a bit of city-builder/strategy game like Valhalla Hills.
Rend
Rend is an up-and-coming, Nordic-themed, team-based survival game that is set in a wild and ruthless, fantasy world filled with fantastic creatures, where only the strongest are able to ascend to the realms of the gods. In this game, players are separated into their respective factions at the beginning. They are then given the freedom to explore the many biomes and harvest resources from the environment whether solo or co-operatively. The resources obtained can then be used to craft better weapons and tools or can be reinvested into the faction stronghold to fortify it from potential attacks from players from a rival faction and to advance your base just so you can unlock new technologies. Players have their own skill systems and talent trees as well, and these are the main ways for a player to customize and tweak their characters to their liking.The ultimate goal of the game, however, is to reap as many warrior spirits as you can by battling and defeating rival players and deposit the souls at the Divinity Stone in the middle of your faction base, that is if you're not slain while carrying such precious loot. Somewhat similar to grand strategy games, Rend is more of a continual game. It has game cycles of 2 to 3 months, in which the winning faction of each cycle will get a nice pile of rewards at the end of a cycle.
Rend has a really unique take on the survival genre and this might just give the game the fuel it needs to rise to the top. The game is currently in Alpha and its release date is still TBD.
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