An interesting idea with poor execution and terrible progression.

How's this for a game pitch - the survival and crafting elements of Don't Starve, with the building of Fortnite, and the combat/loot of Diablo. Sounds like a rad game, huh?
Yeah too bad Tribes of Midgard botches literally every single one of those components. The "survival" aspect is dry, the building is barely functional, and the combat is clumsy at best.

The survival aspects of the game basically equate to having to keep a tree well-fed with energy while you survive nightly attacks from enemies that end up being more tedious than fun. And then every few nights a spongey giant will show up and absolutely wreck everything. The jump in difficulty from "you're killing these little guys" to "now this giant is walking through your base and oops it's game over" is wild.

But even if you can get past all that and you can somehow still enjoy the gameplay, the game itself gives you absolutely nothing to work toward beyond a single currency that lets you buy some frankly horrible cosmetics for your character.
Nothing to make your character play different, nothing to vary the runs, nothing to really change any aspect of the gameplay loop. What's more is if the giant kills you before you can race to the Bifrost to escape the realm, you don't get any of that cosmetic. You get nothing.

The game also has a Survival mode which thankfully lets your customize the run a bit by scaling the difficulties of various aspects of the game down to enemy spawns, tree health, etc. It's great. The problem is that Survival mode has zero objectives. You can't even get the cosmetic currency.
Not only that, but you strangely can't even fight any of the special bosses. So why even play this mode?

+ Interesting idea

- No meaningful progression
- Clumsy combat
- Terrible building
- Poor balance resulting in wild difficulty spikes
- Boring

The biggest thing this game gets right is survival/action gameplay combined with defined goals that can be knocked out in 30-90 minutes. In the same way that Battlerite felt like a MOBA without the laning phase, this feels like a survival game where the first five hours have been compressed into five minutes. It's a shame that there's nothing else really special about this - take a survival game, add a class system, compress the entire "run" into a couple hours, and that's it! Because things move so fast, there's never a whole lot of room for individual runs to shine - there's not enough time for you to feel like your "build" is doing anything unique, or like you've been forced to play in a weird way due to the way each run is "randomized". I think the ideal version of this game is somewhere in between the two modes presently available, where you'd have enough time to feel invested in a particular run and its unique qualities without feeling like you've just started a new full-time job. Creating this hypothetical game mode would require a pretty drastic re-imagining of the game's identity, so while it's unreasonable to expect devs to completely reinvent their game just for me, I hope there's a game dev out there playing this and going "Damn.. survival games really should be shorter."

“Potential Co-op Fun, Bland Solo Runs”

“Tribes Of Midgard” is an interesting game - it takes elements of base-building, RPG skill trees, survival crafting games, and ARPG’s, blending them all together into a complicated assortment of mechanics. It’s a decent looking game from a distance, but the detail of many characters is lost upon closer inspection. There isn’t much of a story, and you don’t really learn too much about its otherwise bland world after playing for hours. It is definitely aimed at co-op gameplay, yet provides a single-player mode anyways… to no real avail. While this mishmash of interesting mechanics sounds rich on the surface, it ends up as a clunky and stressful game that seems to give no care to your time and effort.

The game’s tutorial is a very ominous sign of what is to come for a new player - you’re dropped into the game world and taught how to collect a few resources, craft a few items, and fight enemies… and that’s it. Once you hop into a real game, the game chucks copious amounts of systems at you without a care in the world if you are prepared to handle them. To put it simply, these are the major mechanics a new player must understand from the jump - protect the seed of Yggdrasil from enemy attacks, manage your base defenses, upgrade your NPC’s to buy/craft items, complete quests throughout the game world, kill giants skulking the lands towards your base, manage resources, and time management. To me, this was just too much to throw at a new player fresh from the simple tutorial that was given, yet I quickly learned that the toughest component to fight against was time itself.

See, this game is more of a time management simulator than anything else it claims to be. You’ll want to go on a quest, but your base will be attacked from Helthings. Once you deal with that, you’ll go to your quest and hopefully complete it right away (which does not really happen often). Oh wait - did you forget to repair your gear after defeating the wave of Helthings raiding your camp? You better collect materials to either craft new items or repair your old ones! Is your base too weak to enemy raids? Better upgrade it with your collected items, even though you’ll be forced to decide between base-building and RPG scaling! If you end up running into these diversions, you’ll realize that by not completing your quest you’ll already be behind on souls (the in-game economy).

This was a major flaw I noticed right off the bat with this game - you will inevitably hit a wall and thus require a small boost from the game itself in order to progress slightly further. Yet this is akin to other rouge-lites, so why is it an issue here? It’s simple really - the tedious collection loop. You’ll be so sick of mining materials, crafting building pieces, and chopping trees, and once you finally get to a new part of the game, you end up losing and repeating the process all over again. Very little new items are introduced between runs, and procedural world generation ensures no consistency in tactics. Therefore, you’ll play this game’s loop for dozens of hours until you finally have a strong enough start to propel you to the finish line.

This issue really got to me since I was playing solo the whole time. Upon watching other game footage, some of the fun could be alleviated by grouping with other warriors - this way, different parties can focus on different tasks, solving the time management issue! Yet, the game scales difficulty with more players, thus slightly lowering the grind but still keeping it as a main component of the game. For a solo player, it just becomes unbearable by the third run.

The visuals are fine and the game mechanics are individually solid, so why isn’t this game that good? It lies in three things: the lack of cohesion with game mechanics, the immense focus on grind, and the lack of polish for game balance. This results in a tedious experience that some may be able to get past, but others may note its failed potential and move on to other titles.

Unfortunately, I’m one of the latter people. I just don’t have the time to grind away at various mechanics that all feel like they exist purely to steepen the game’s learning curve. I wanted a game that allowed me more freedom in exploration, creativity in crafting, and engagement with the world and lore. Instead, I got another mock-job of an online-only multiplayer experience (seriously, no local co-op is a sin for this type of title). It’s a unique game, but it doesn’t make it a particularly good one, and I would Not Recommend it unless you are dying for an experience that doesn’t really create new ideas and doesn’t allow you to properly experience it without at least three other friends. Even so, prepare to sink a few days into it until you reach its end-game…

Final Verdict: 4/10 (Below Average)

This game is currently in the Humble Choice for January 2023, this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before February 7th, 2023, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.

A fun survival game with a focus on battle.

Tribes of Midgard does a lot to let people get into the survival genre. Looting of items is extremely fast, players can level up and build up their base and character as they want. The entire game is based on trying to survive, as long as the player can, against an onslaught of enemies, including impressive giant Jotuns, and if players fail the game resets and has the player start over on a different map to make different choices.

The other side is while the tutorial is good, there’s a lot to understand, to the point I would say most players are going to have to spend 5-10 hours just to understand the proper flow of the game or read a guide. But there’s a bigger problem. There is a cash shop, which appears to be limited to cosmetic items, and a battle pass, with daily or weekly quests, that’s something I always call out. With Ubisoft and Gearbox Publishing involved with the game’s launch, I worry.

Pick this up if you like survival games, especially if you want to partner up with a few people and play a game. This has a 10-player online multiplayer which is unique, and while there’s only a horde mode and a survival mode, it does feel like there’s a decent amount of content here to keep you entertained.

If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/bxcCaC4dN1E

O jogo é uma merda, tutorial confuso e nada intuitivo, vc fica rodando o mapa infinito, hora ou outra crafta alguma coisa, e se seu personagem morrer na agua (o que não é muito difícil considerando que parece que ta nadando no ácido de tão rápido que desce sua vida) vc praticamente perde tds seus itens, principalmente se houverem inimigos perto da agua, tornando quase impossível de recuperar, ja que vc toma dano muito rapidamente, da agua e dos inimigos. Existem alguns inimigos que podem ser facilmente counteraveis, tornando o sistema de combate chato e repetitivo, a primeira missão já é super confusa, sem nenhuma orientação de onde é necessário ir, e isso não seria um problema se a exploração fosse divertida, tribes of midgard é um jogo repetitivo e medíocre.