Ymir on Steam — A game review
On the surface, when you start up a new game of Ymir, you’ll see a few familiar game features and maybe think, ‘OK its a city building game for pigs — could be fun.’
You’d be wrong.
Not about the fun part, but the game assumption. Ymir is those things, but there is a lot more to it. Its complex. Layers upon layers of complex.
Ymir is a 4X strategy game. It is single or multiplayer and takes elements from two broad genres. You will spend a lot of time in your region, managing and building your piggy city, but there is also a wider ‘Civ’-like component where you trot around (get it?) exploring and generally finding new things or coming a cropper.
You’ll start out with a little tribe. It’s a daunting start and as you gaze at the interface with dozens of buttons and numbers, and you may, as I did gulp. But push on; a few helpful quests will arrive and they are a good entry point into making sense of it all.
After your tribe has settled in a decent area (yes ok I did that thing where I restarted 20 times until I got the area I wanted — Civ players you get me, right?) and you’ve watched your tribe busy themselves on your first set of quests, you’ll eventually have a decent little pig village and all will be well. Then the quests run out and you are left again feeling mildly panicked;
“What do I do?”
“Ymir is a slow game. I mean deliciously slow.”
Well basically don’t do anything (at least not straight away) — you need to let the game unfold. It took me awhile to realize at first but Ymir is a slow game. I mean deliciously slow. You set it up and let your little pig empire do their thing. Its slow like Tamagotchi slow. Or growing a tree.
Things will pop up, options to research, events to react to and you can make your choices and see what happens. (Your choices can have brutal consequences by the way. There is a reason for this slowness though, and that’s Ymir is building towards filling a game niche that I didn’t even realise existed until now. Its lofty ambition is to be a persistant mmo style, always-on city builder world conquest game. How exciting is that? You, or your mate can run a server — the huge Ymir world is persistant and ever growing and over time you watch your empire grow and change. You can’t ignore it of course, there is an economy to manage (probably as complex as a real economy), research to pursue, policies to enact, armies to manage and a whole population to assign roles and responsibilities. In fact everything needs to be managed except a few things that normally need to be managed. The combat, for example, is taken care of by your subjects.
“I’ll have the AI cracked and this game broken in no time”
And each of those little roles is, as I have mentioned already, complex. If you are one of those strategy players that cracks their knuckles when they start a new game thinking “I’ll have the AI cracked and this game broken in no time”(maybe I do that….) well you may have met your match.
Graphically the game isn’t going to win any awards. Its basic stuff but serves its purpose. The cartoon style works well with the pig theme however. The music is pleasant and fits the game style but the UI leans towards being overly complex, and maybe a little work still needs to be done here.
Ymir, however, is still early access and far from finished. Its frame rate can be laggy, and starting up the game server is currently a frustrating little mini-game all of its own. But if you are a strategy game lover, and maybe you work at your PC and over to the left is an extra monitor that you only use for YouTube; you should keep an eye on the development of this game. One day you could have your own little piggy world distraction, to break up the boredom of working from home or getting anything useful done. I see great promise in Ymir.
Ymir is currently available in Steam as early access and published by Thibaud Michaud. Keys are only available privately but well worth a follow if you feel your strategy itch hasn’t been scratched in a while.
A note on the Nano tag: The publishers of this game are willing to accept Nano a payment for their game. Nano is an emerging and powerful cryptocurrency which is currently rapidly building its ecosystem (Check out nano.org or the nano center if you want to find out more.)
