After 63 hours of playtime and given how much I'm loving it so far, I figured I'd do a review!

I'm a big fan of Colony Sims and played a lot of Conan/Arc too. I can honestly say, despite Aska still being in Early Access, it's already golden. This game already has so much content and a satisfying gameplay loop.

Pros:
-You can build your village as big or small as you want to in terms of AI population and also buildings.
-You can design the internal systems of your village as you please to set up a production chain.
-From very early on, you can already start to automate a lot of the more boring stuff about survival games (constantly having to chop trees and bring them back to base).
-With the addition of pathmakers and roadmakers, you can not only improve the aesthetics of your village, but you can fine-tune a lot of the AI pathing as you see fit.
-There are SO many different jobs available for your village, you can either choose to take on those jobs yourself to "fill in the gaps" so-to-speak, or you can assign villagers to do it for you. Not only that, but you can finetune HOW you want the villagers to do it, which is a huge bonus to avoid any frustrations.
-I can see there are some placeholders in game for expansion (such as being able to select the style of archer you want, but only currently having one option). With the barracks you can choose between different melee roles for your villagers and so this suggests that the in-game systems are still expanding.
-Villagers are cheap. Only costing 5 Jotun blood (Which is an abundant resource) it's very easy to scale your village quickly. This brings a lot of excitement when scaling the village and making sure to manage your input/output accordingly (and bed, never forget beds!).
-You play as part of the village. Instead of a typical colony sim where you rule the village and manage it from above, Aska lets you be part of the village which helps with the immersion.
-The gameplay loop is awesome. There's always improvements to be made to your settlements, constant threats of day or night time village raids (of different types). For me, the Valheim raids were a little slow-paced and infrequent in the vanilla game, I enjoy how much Aska keeps you on your toes. It really promotes leaning into the system management side of things early on.

NEUTRAL (Some things I love, but I could see how people might find them annoying).
-To make iron tools you must first use bellows on iron ore (with the proper quantities of iron/coal), then you must hit the bloom on all sides with a hammer, then you must re-heat the bloom, choose what iron part you want to build and then hammer it on all sides again to create the product. I love this system as it makes you feel very rewarded when you get to iron tools after all the effort you put in. I could see how this might feel a bit long-winded for less-motivated players, though!

CONS
-Early on, you might put all of your buildings close together until you expand more. There is not an easy way to move buildings though, other than demolishing them and rebuilding them somewhere else. Some kind of packyack builders can use to break down your buildings and move them to a second position to rebuild them in half the time or something would be nice.
-Building positions affect happiness which promotes the concept of moving buildings or at least knowing exactly where to put them from the moment you start a village, but as I said, there is currently no easy way to do this.
-There's currently no way to break down obsolete items (stone axes, etc, that villagers spawn in with). I imagine this may be added soon as I just unlocked the tinkerers bench which is pretty close to doing something similar (using the item up, getting some knowledge and small resources for learning about it).
-If you are unprepared, the first winter(and then later winter invasion) can take you back a lot of steps, it's pretty brutal. I had to reset my first save due to this, I'm happy to rebuild and do it all again with the new knowledge I got from playing, but a friend mentioned this and I could see how this may put some people off. Again, being able to move structures around may fix this, as you could then quickly rearrange guard towers, etc. My top tip for this is to follow the SerBucky guide on the farm rush to get a bunch of flax to build warm armour.
-Still some awkward interactions (my armoursmith can't take from my workshop's storage, he has to wait until my warehouse worked has moved the stuff from the workshop into the warehouse, this slows things down a bunch in terms of gearing up).


This MIGHT just be my favourite survival colony sim on the market currently. :)

Phenomenal game thus far! Though it is unpolished, there is an absolutely loveable playability. Would definitely recommend as it takes little HD space and is really fun/intriguing. it mixes Valheim and a village builder. Can't wait to play with more people, as that is the viking way. Strength through unity!

the ai is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ brain dead... ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.