I had no idea how badly I was missing out when I slept on StunForge and HypeTrain Digital's Nordhold when it initially released last March. Nordhold is currently sitting at an 80 on Metacritic, and Steam reviews are Very Positive, so evidently the word got out to the gaming public and I just missed it. Well, I'm here to rectify that situation.
Nordhold is a tower defense game, but don't let that deter you from trying it out. This is the deepest, most complex tower defense game I've ever played. It's like 30% tower defense, 30% economy management, 30% roguelike mechanics, and 10% cussing. The cussing comes from me.
Nordhold is the epitome of an "easy to pick up, tough to master" game. Yes, it is a tower defense game, and you do plop your towers along a procedurally generated path, and yes, they do shoot at mobs that march dutifully through whatever dire crucible you have assembled along the sides to kill them. But the game is so much more than that. Usually in tower defense games, you are protecting a gate, trying to keep a certain number of baddies from reaching it. Nordhold is the first game I've played that asks the question "What's on the other side of the gate?"
Turns out, there's a whole city over there. And in the city is a veritable ton of structures you can build, which either generate materials for your towers or perks for your playthrough. Oh, and you have to build houses and hire workers to produce your resources. And each structure offers a mountain of perks, some of which are only active for one run, and some of which are permanent. The economy in Nordhold is delicate - mismanage one resource or have a worker in the wrong mill for one wave, and you might be toast. You really, really have to pay attention.
At the end of almost every wave, the game offers roguelike-style perks, which can completely alter the mechanics of your towers, making or breaking your run. And at the end of each run (you are gonna die, a lot), you get Honor points, which can be used to unlock more permanent perks and bonuses.
The whole thing feels a lot like a real-time strategy game with a tower defense game tacked onto it, all of it under a roguelike umbrella. The combination is explosively addictive. I'm to the point where a run takes me anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour, so that "one more run" feeling (present in spades) can easily chew up an afternoon before you know it.
Nordhold came to my attention this week because the team behind it released a huge update, with a full new game mode that adds even more permanent perk options in the form of a massive skill tree that can be layered on top of the already insanely deep perk menu. There is a new tower type and all sorts of other goodies - including new power banners and skills, and an in-game skin shop (no microtransactions!).
I really didn't know what I was doing yet in this video, but it still gives a taste of the gameplay.
Since I engaged with it, Nordhold has been gobbling up hours of my life, and I've been grinning the entire time. This game takes the tower defense genre and expands it in every possible direction. Nordhold is crystalized video game addiction, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
