ASKA Review: A True Viking Adventure for Co‑op-Players

Have you ever had one of those days where you were so overwhelmed with tasks, that you had to reach out to your colleagues and ask them to please share the workload? ‘Yeah sure I will help you, do not worry, I got this!’
A huge burden falls from your shoulders as you hear these words. You think to yourself: ‘Thank Odin, finally I'll have time for the important stuff!’

Released from the grasp of your workbench, you head off into the woods to explore the vast landscape. In the background sits your tiny village where you are not only the chieftain, but also… the cook, the hunter, the farmer, the builder, the warrior… and the babysitter.

As soon as your silhouette vanishes between the trees, your ‘helpful hands’ roll up their sleeves, put up their shaded sunglasses and relax.

As the guard mumbles to himself: ‘I feel unsafe in my own home. Why does no one defend the village?!’, the cook tries to grasp the link between the stove and the huge pile of meat on the side and the workstation turns into a break room for the smith, the gardener and the newly invading draugrs, your little stroll comes to an abrupt end.

There is a saying, ‘Happiness is the only product in the world that multiplies by division’ - in your little village this also applies to workload. This was a run-down of our first few hours in ASKA, a Viking-themed crafting action-adventure game by Sand Sailor Studio. Reading the developer’s description of their game, which was released into Early Access on Steam on June 20, 2024, they describe the game as follows:

Those three sentences spoke to our survival-crafting hearts. Building a Viking-themed village with the help of NPCs that take their share of all the gathering, building and crafting? That sounds great! Unfortunately though, our villagers were not only far from eligible to put the words ‘fierce’ or ‘intelligent’ into their resume, they were also constantly trying to add more distress and chaos to our fight for survival. At one point, we jokingly started calling our settlement ‘Toddler Town’, as they seemed equally coordinated as a Kindergarten group. When they also began to raid our storages and stashes more relentlessly than any of the bunny-like Smolkrs ever could, (and therefore left us behind hungry and thirsty) we finally began to question their allegiance.

But - before you turn away now: we also had a really good time during the 37 hours we played. There is a solid base and some really good ideas that just need a little more time to cook and mature. In the following Early Access review of ASKA, we put down our initial thoughts, what we liked and what, in our opinion, still needs improvement.

We will revisit the game again after some more development has been made and time has passed, so our opinion and the game itself are not made of stone at this point.

As we said in the beginning, ASKA is a crafting action-adventure game with base building, survival mechanics and management of NPC settlers. You are playing as a male or female Viking, who you can customize a bit: hair colors, hairstyle, make-up and tattoos.

After spawning into the game world, you will find yourselves with empty pockets between the remains of a wrecked boat on a lonely but hostile beach. To get started and prevail against the enemies lurking about, you will have to collect a few rocks and twigs and immediately start crafting rudimentary weapons and tools. There is no in-depth tutorial, but the games does offer a little guidance through a wisp and tutorial hints. We spent some minutes looking for the perfect space to place down our first structures: a campfire and a tent, followed by the Eye of Odin, which lets you summon your first NPC settlers to your humble settlement. They can then be assigned to various tasks and take on some of the necessary gathering, crafting, building or fighting. And there is a lot of work to be done around that: collecting rocks, chopping trees for wood, collecting berries or mushrooms for food are just some of the early games’ tasks necessary for survival and growth. Your character has a leveling system for all aspects of the games’ mechanics, which will be raised by doing the associated tasks (e.g. gathering will level up by harvesting wild berries).

Dying is possible, by having your HP reduced to zero (duh). This can not only happen during combat with enemy units, but also because of starvation or freezing to death. In that case, you will be able to respawn and accept a malus or … sacrifice one of your settlers and not get a malus (everyone will have that one villager that won’t be missed. I am looking at you, Hedda). Every new villager to join your village requires five blood of jotun, which you have to harvest from the glowing blue ores and put into the Eye of Odin to summon a new person. Then, you get to choose between 2 NPCs with 3 of their 6 defining traits revealed, and after 10 minutes, the chosen one will appear in your village. They will then need their own tent or bed in a house, as well as the right tools to fulfill their future job. Some of the management involves planning out their workdays as well. When and for how long they should work, rest and sleep should be planned based on their personality and your needs. Long work hours will result in low happiness and some workers’ happiness will plummet during rain or if they have to work during the night.

Besides raw survival (not dying), there are multiple goals for you to hunt. Some of the more advanced buildings are locked behind other advancements that you will have to achieve first. Others are tied to exploration and conquering minibosses. The game always gives you clear hints for any prerequisites.

We decided to try and grow our village to a respectable size, build all structures available and equip a full set of armor on our characters. After that, we took some time to explore the map.

To get there, we had to play the core mechanics: gathering, crafting, more gathering and even more crafting. Some of the work was outsourced to settler NPCs, who either did a great job or did not do anything valuable at all. Workers are assigned to tasks by assigning them to the respective structure (e.g. a maison has to be assigned to a stone hut to set out and collect rocks). The NPCs have randomly generated personality traits which either benefit your village or be a big burden for efficacy. For example, a lot of our workers had a trait which made them unhappy during rainy weather. One of your responsibilities in the management of all workers is keeping their happiness closer to 100 than 0. If they are very unhappy for longer periods, they will leave your village. This can be harmful for your progress, as workers are leveling up their skills over time as well, just as your avatar does. Losing one guy that you had sent out to train melee combat to level 30 for 10 gaming hours sets you back quite a bit. They will drop their equipment and inventory before leaving, but it’s still a loss.

One player will be the host for one game world. The host will choose a name for their instanced world and can set a password. The others can then join said server from the main menu → Join. Hosts that you have added to your steam friends list should be listed at the top of page 1 and are indicated by a golden star. If you cannot find your friends’ world, you can also join them by using the join feature of the Steam Overlay (see our guide if you are not sure how to do this).

It is also possible to join strangers’ worlds if they decided to not set a password.

But keep in mind: your character’s individual progress is bound to one world. And the worlds are only accessible when the host is online and… well, hosting it.

One world has 4 open slots, so you can play with up to 3 friends or strangers.

From the beginning, Co-Op felt good, natural and responsive. You can work on the same goals or split tasks and work on multiple things. Especially in the beginning, it is well worth it to stick together, because you will only be able to craft flimsy tools that make gathering more time-consuming and combat more difficult.

If you're planning on playing with strangers or people you do not yet sit in Discord with (or another voicecom or chatting software), please be mindful that communicating is extremely limited. There is no ingame chat nor voice chat or pre-made prompts (as in a chat-wheel). This makes it hard to coordinate anything. You can however, use the Steam chat function to chat. But this takes away some of the immersion and flow, of course.

... Your kids?

• Yes, but only older children. Sand Sailor Studio has not yet announced a PEGI rating, but as (non-bloody, but still) combat against skeletons and undead are part of the survival aspect, we expect a recommended age of 12 years+.

... Someone new to gaming?

• Yes, but probably only if the person is interested in the games' setting and mechanics. As you can assist each other at all times, even someone not that experienced in survival/crafting games or gaming in general can have some fun. The occasional attacks of enemy NPCs on your settlement is not too difficult to deal with and doesn't happen too often. There are also activities that are more comfy, like farming, cooking and tending to tameable wolf pups.

The endgame is a little limited at the time of our review, right after the Early Access Release. You can, of course, continue to optimize, grow and beautify your village as long as you wish. But there is no (repeatable) endgame content yet and we did not encounter a natural ending, like for example the end of a story line. There is a rough story frame introduced in the starting sequence, but the rest of the game is based on ressource and building progression. Additionally, there are currently four smaller and one bigger boss encounters that drop special loot.

All in all, this also limits the replay value a bit. Sure, you can restart with a new character and your improved knowledge, but the game worlds seem to only be randomly generated to a certain degree. There are just a handful of different biomes and the world map is limited in size by surrounding water. As are the resources - and this is a big issue currently.

We struggled to keep up with the demands after some point, as for the longest time we only had one single ore mine. After this mine was depleted, we were out of iron and could not advance our gear or our town’s structures. The same seemed to be the case for trees and the bigger rocks. While smaller plants seemed to regrow from season to season, the area around our settlement started to clear out and we, as well as our workers, had to travel further and further. This led us to more exploration of the map to rule out more sources of materials. Very far from our village, we discovered a second mine. But as it was located on the other side of the map, within a distance impossible to cover by daily trips for our NPCs. We would have had to build another small mining hub there. But, therein lies one of our biggest criticisms: building outposts and transporting goods around the map feels like a loophole and we could never get it to work properly. The only option often was to just go and get the materials by ourselves, while the workers travelled over plains over long distances. To rest, they would have to return to the village.

At one point, we tried building a fisher hut by the beach, to supply our main settlement in the middle of the world map. So we built a fishing hut, assigned a worker to it and provided a tent for him nearby. To transport the fish, we needed to build a warehouse and a market. Both need assigned workers - and therefore two more tents. We then realized that the fisherman would need food as well, so we had to build a campfire barbecue. To automate this, we needed a fourth worker at the outpost who cooked the food - and another tent. OK, we thought, at this point everything should be settled, although it felt like overhead. Then, the fisherman started to complain that he needed more fishing rods… At this point, we gave up. We would have to assign a fifth villager to craft fishing rods, but for that they would have needed material to do so, which would have required … you guessed it, a sixth person. Neither could the fisherman at this point sustain the outpost (with the fish caught), but one problem’s solution only lead to the next. The only way for this to work out (for a short time), would have been one of us constantly manually managing the outpost by cooking, collecting and transporting everything between settlements with a sled. And we did not see the fun in that.

Transportation and management of outposts needs some adjustments in future updates - or the idea of longer distances to cover as ressources get scarcer just does not work for the players at all. You would have to move your whole village to the next area, a task we would not want to face at all.

At this point, we have spent around 37 hours in ASKA and shared some hearty laughter, fun and a sprinkle of annoyance (mainly because of the villager’s IQ). In our opinion, this is a reasonable amount for the game’s price. Your gaming session can be as short or long as your schedule allows. In singleplayer mode, there is also a pause option in the menu.

As ASKA had just launched into Early Access by the time of this review, the game is of course still in active development. We do expect a lot more improvements and content to come in the future.
The developer releases regular patches and fixes. and seems to be very transparent regarding the game’s development progress.

Surprisingly we did not encounter many technical issues. We had one crash right at the start and never again after that. Servers were always available and open and hosting/joining our world was quick and responsive. Once, the ingame join option did not work properly, but joining via steam overlay always did.

Most of our problems arose from the NPC management system and their ‘intelligence’. With some individuals, it seemed impossible to stabilize or increase their happiness; even when released from any work duty, they would not recover above 20/100 happiness and eventually pack their things and leave. This was frustrating to watch, as we were actively trying to improve their well-being nonstop, but to no effect. Also, the banner system that is used to tell NPCs where they should chop wood or collect berries did not always seem to work as we thought it should. When placed, sometimes the workers did still not harvest in the region where we built a banner, but instead elsewhere or (in the worst case) stayed in the village and told us repeatedly to build new banners. The area around the banner still had the ressources they were sent out to get, though.
In addition to this, the management UI was a bit hard to work with at points. ---

The performance was stable at all times, even during rainstorms and blizzards, when a lot of particles had to be rendered. We did not encounter any stuttering or memory leaks nor did we face any game-breaking bugs or glitches. Although there is terraforming, we were never stuck on the terrain - but if it would happen, there is an unstuck option in the main menu. The only problems we had with terrain was being stuck in a mining cave when using sleds, which you can use to transport more goods from A to B.

ASKA is a great addition to our ever-growing library of viking themed games. While some players compared it to the obvious competitors of the same field, we think it found its very own spot in its niche.
ASKA combines the various aspects of survival, crafting and action in a different way as for example Valheim. The focus lies more on managing NPCs and ressources effectively than building detailled villages plank by plank or exploring vast world maps.
It is very challenging to set up your village, recruit the first settlers and plan out which worker is best suited for the tasks. Since every NPC has strenghts and weaknesses, you are never truly done with optimization. Perfecting work hours, dual-shift systems and providing enough to satisfy the settlers' needs, is a true challenge that we obviously did not see before in other viking-themed games.