Roots of Yggdrasil

I don't have anything to say that's objectively bad... it's fine I guess. The artwork is great, the story is...fine. The gameplay really overstays its welcome, there really wasn't anything to incentivize me to change my strategy after figuring out what everything did. There are different powerups, different hero characters, different levels, different house types, but somehow none of these really changed how I played the game. Once I figured out what all the buildings did and what the resources were then each run, *each level*, basically played out the same way.

This is a really tough one to rate. An extremely fun concept and fantastic atmosphere with glacial metaprogression, and mildly clunky building controls while playing loops that become a massive hindrance when upgrading your base. It's a lot of fun playing loops, moving from island to island and carefully planning out an approach while simultaneously building my deck. The building controls are a little clunky, it's quite irritating fiddling with building placement to squeeze them into the best position. But runs are fairly dynamic and your deck and buffs can have a decent impact on how you play. Unfortunately outside of loops unlocks trickle in at an agonizing pace. Seeing the same cards over and over again is disappointing especially when it seems like there's a lot locked behind currencies that collect very slowly. This is extra frustrating due to runs taking well over an hour - finishing a run and unlocking maybe one or two tree upgrades is demoralizing. The building controls are just plain atrocious in the home base. Buildings are buried in a massive unsearchable hand of cards you have to mouse over one by one. You can't move placed buildings so if you need to relocate a group (proximity requirements force you to move them around a lot) you have to send them back to your hand as cards then find them again one by one. Building unlocks come just as slow as tree unlocks, but their impact is disappointing. +2% card rarity, +1 per loop of a resource you'll be spending hundreds of, etc. At the rate they're unlocking, I wonder if their impact will be significant after even 50 loops played. Even worse, they unlock via card packs so you have very little control over what you get. And the absolute cherry on top is that the packs that give you the resources you badly need (iron, trees - prereqs for many buildings) have a 50% chance to give you [b]useless cosmetic items[/b] instead. Atrocious home base mechanics aside, I really like the main gameplay. Runs feel dynamic and it oozes Norse mythological atmosphere. In the end I think this is an okay game that could be good with slightly better building controls and great with better metaprogression. Unfortunately nothing's likely to change with the game last being updated in the month of its release, over a year and a half ago. Tentatively recommended, but you should try the demo to see if the core gameplay will carry the day since the metaprogression will rarely do anything impactful.