ASKA
Lay claim to unspoiled lands and pave the way for a fierce Viking tribe. Craft the ultimate settlement solo or together with up to x3 friends. Trust in the Gods and the power of the Eye of Odin and summon intelligent NPC villagers to provide camaraderie and relief from the toils of survival.
ASKA is a early access, online co-op and multiplayer game
developed by Sand Sailor Studio
and published by Thunderful Publishing.
Released on June 20th 2024 is available only on Windows
in 13 languages: English, German, Romanian, French, Italian, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Ukrainian.
It has received 5,128 reviews of which 4,061 were positive and 1,067 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.7 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 17.49€ on Steam and has a 30% discount.
The Steam community has classified ASKA into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- Processor: Intel Core i5 6600 or AMD Ryzen 5 1600
- Memory: 16GB GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 (6GB) or AMD RX 590
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 6 GB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
After 112 hours, I think we've kind of finished this. Aska is one of the more unusual entries in our collection of survival games. It is more of a city builder survival game than the others. Most of the gather and crafting activities are too slow and tedious to do them by hand for long. You have a way to summon villagers to do those things for you. Doing so makes it even harder, however, to keep them watered, fed, clothed, etc. Meanwhile animals will attack you and the weather will test you. Moving forward on the skill tree, while keeping everyone alive and building your defensible village is pretty much the whole gameplay loop here. There is an island to explore with boss areas to kill and gain resources from. The pace of the game, overall, is quite slow and yet it somehow manages to make you feel like you can't wander away from the keyboard for long. We played as a group of three and enjoyed it, but were hoping there'd be more skill progression from unlocking resources and an endgame of some kind. We more got bored in the end than felt like we had conquered something. Still was worth playing. Some of the mechanics here are uniqaue and it definitely has a neat art style and feel while playing it.
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The village building RTS elements and the responsive gameplay make Aska stand out from other survival crafting games. It can be a cozy village builder or a gritty survival crafter in whatever proportion you like now that custom settings are available. Pros: * Gameplay feels responsive and controls are intuitive; keys can be remapped * Focus on village building makes the world feel substantially less empty than other survival crafters * There is a lot to build, and a whole game unto itself around village layout and resource and personnel mangement and workflow. Villager have individual traits that make them better or worse at specific jobs, during particular times of day, and in different weather. * Build designs are extremely thoughtful and immersive; each phase of construction a build goes through revolves around a specific section of the final building, requiring logical resources - thatch for the beds inside the cottage, bark for rooves, logs for foundation posts, etc. * Combat is a satisfying combination of player skill and gear quality. It's satisfying that you can kill most anything with a tree branch if you have the patience and skill, and it's also satisfying that swapping that tree branch for an iron axe makes short work of mundane foes even if the wielder is not very skilled. * You can do any job your villagers can do, so although the game can become grindy if your villager loadout is inadequate for your plans, it's rare for production bottlenecks to cause problems. * Female default protagonist is great; it's also great that you can choose to be male character as well if you wish. Aska and Ragnar are both fun to play. * Animal AI scripts are very immersive; lone wolves dart in when you're distracted, but facing them causes them to back off - only to come back before long to catch you distracted again. Wolves in groups are bolder and attack more directly, and groups form by happenstance as individual wolves wander the area near their den spawner. Prey animals dash in to steal your resources but dart away if humans come too near. * The rendering of the fields and forests and beaches of Aska is good but not great; but the wilderness is well designed, allowing for a cozy, chill experience when not in direct conflict with undead monsters. ;D * Single player game allows pausing! * Villager AI is good; they eat, sleep, work, rally to defend the village, and flee from predators reliably, and seem able to locate resources stored in various buildings, on the ground, etc as needed. I have never lost a villager to starvation or cold, only to catastrophic violence. Cons: * The terraforming mechanisms are rudimentary and it is VERY challenging to set up a village layout that isn't marred by immovable, unusable boulders and frequent abrupt changes in elevation (realistic but annoying). Other factors also make it challenging to set up a good village layout; the island feels small, densely packed with forest and rock, and a bit light on flat land near important resources. * Grindy, especially while you are learning about how best to allocate your human resources. Whatever your villagers are not doing you must do yourself, and there is a LOT of work to do to reach the point of being able to make clothes for the winter, metal weapons and leather armor for end game fights, and advanced tools for advanced mechanics like wolf taming. Certainly not worse than other survival crafters in this respect, though, and at least the villagers can be assigned to focus on things you particularly don't want to deal with. * Slow to start. There is a lot of end game content I have never seen because I find myself restarting frequently to try to apply my new insights to identifying a better starting location, making better early game choices, etc. This is entertaining for me, but drags out tremendously in time because the beginning of the game is slow and drawn out. The period before the first tool upgrade can be agonizing at times, since gathering the resource required to create new villagers takes ages with the Tier 0 pickaxe. Once you get the Tier 1 tools things pick up, but Tier 2, metal tools, is far, far away. Many factors can wreck an early settlement before you ever get within spitting distance of metal tools. This is not too devastating most of the time because you can reduce your labor by assigning villagers to do it, but getting enough villagers in the first place can be a haul. * Procedural island generation means that it's possible to roll a dud in various ways, where the only metal harvesting node is surrounded by challenging enemy spawners, there is no flat land in sufficient proximity to a source of natural water to make an efficient farm near your village, etc. This doesn't make your game unplayable but it does make some seeds much, much more challenging (and grindy) than others. I once had a game where my iron cave was very close to a smolkr (large, rabbit-like prey animals that steal and consume resources of all types) spawner, and before I could figure out how to stop them, they had eaten all the iron my villager mined from the cave, driving us back again and again for more until my miner broke through into a nest of deadly mine critters that slaughtered my villagers . Many factors affect the desirability of a village site, and some seeds are just better than others, necessitating some difficult decisions about whether it's less annoying to restart or to power through on a seed that is objectively more challenging/time consuming/etc. Overall, even with its flaws, Aska is the survival crafter that I come back to over and over and play with my partner.
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I've been playing this sort of genre for a very long time, and the games that are the most fun take things from other successful games and combine it into a seamless whole. Aska has the time scheduler of Rimworld, the 3rd person village building of Medieval Dynasty, the combat approaching Valheim (but not that good), the countdown to a large assault of 7 days to die. You play games for a long enough time and you see this sort of progression of features. The start is always the same: you begin with nothing, naked, alone, and it's always exciting on first plays to find out where you can go. Can you build things from components, or are there ready made structures? (it's the latter, but very modular). Is there a skill tree with abilities? (no, but there are skills). Is there a progressively more difficult combat challenge as time progresses? (somewhat). Do you hack it alone or can you build a community? (community!). Is there always something to do? (yes). Are better things gated by scarce resources? (gated yes, scarce no). Can you build roads and do they matter? (yes!) Is surviving with food and drink at the start hard? (no). Are there quests? (no). Are decorations just cosmetic or do they help? (they help!). Are your villagers generic or do they come with skillsets? (skillsets!) Is your building area constrained? (nope you can build anywhere). Can you mod the terrain? (yes, except for certain rocks, and it's tedious but possible to make slopes). Fixed, designed map or randomly generated via seeds? (seeds) I could go on with the various aspects of survival and management crafters but Aska slaps together enough of these features in a satisfying enough manner to keep you going. The game is absolutely not difficult. You will fail the first time because winter is absolutely punishing unless you rush to a farm, plant one or two 16 plot fields of flax, and get yourself and your crew some basic clothes via the weaver workshop addon before day 21ish. If you manage that, everything else is trivial, especially after you craft your first gambeson. But despite a lack of difficulty, the way you design your village and its tasks matter a lot, and you'll spend lots of time thinking on how to optimize everything and how to secure a steady flow of things that are not scarce (birch trees) but nevertheless require a lot of labour and steps. Absolute recommend. Playing it with my cousin. Sadly the difficulty does not scale with extra players, but the game is young, the expansion possibilities are endless, and the base is solid and enjoyable. ---- Game developer time is zero sum, feature bloat is a danger, but there are tried and true satisfying game mechanics that improve rather than detract from most games. Existing features from other games that would make Aska even better: 1) gating better things via boss fights (Valheim) 2) new biomes with new stuff via sailing (Valheim) 3) better task priority system (Rimworld) 4) Rivers, bridges, watermills 5) More elaborate production chains that take a finished product as a base component of a more advanced product (Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program etc) 6) better and better modes of personal transportation and transportation of stuff (Medieval Dynasty). Already in place somewhat with sleds and the excellent carts 7) expansion of psychological state of villagers (Rimworld) 8) underground pantry to prevent food spoilage (Going Medieval) 9) siege equipment, both friendly and hostile (Going Medieval) 10) more animal husbandry (Rimworld, Going Medieval) 11) Skill trees with investible points 12) more/interesting POIs 13) crop rotation system with fertility mechanic, where you have to leave things fallow 14) expansion of random events 15) diseases 16) items with quality levels and variable stats I could go on but ive got to go to work :(
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Im seeing a lot of bad reviews due to it being too difficult or that the villager AI is bad. It feels like im playing a completely different game than them. It is difficult yes but its a challenge and I like that, in my opinion games that are easy just get boring after awhile. I want the threat of my village being destroyed and things going to hell if im not on top of it. Maybe add some difficulty options on game creation to appease people that dont like that. I am currently on day 40, Ive had to endure lots of attacks and winter, which was brutal (I liked that, it should be brutal.) But my village has endured and its so satisfying. Also the AI is way better than Bellwright, They actually hustle and run around to do stuff, I rarely have to micromanage in comparision. I also dont need to have every villager be a warrior and worry about getting them all weapons, equipment and FOOD etc which really drove me nuts in Bellwright. A few guards is enough to fight off most things and when I pick their equipment load out they go and grab those automatically from my warehouse. Something that I imagine they will add eventually is AI using the sleds and carts to be more efficient which will be nice as well. The grind is not bad in my opinion, or at least I enjoyed the grind. I stopped playing Bellwright because I needed to move my village closer to the center and it was such a pain in the ass and the thought of restarting was an absolute horror because of how much grind that game had. This game I might restart because I want to build somewhere different then I did now that I know what im doing and the thought isnt horrifying. That alone tells me its good. I came back to edit my review because I had to mention the crafting is so good as well! Actually getting the iron hot and then hammering it and then quenching it in water after, the scraping bark off logs to turn into beams and post.... I dont know why but that just really adds to the game for me. This game is already worth every penny and is only going to get better!
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Don't mistake Aska for a survival game like Valheim or a PvP-focused one like ARK. While there are some shared mechanics, this is primarily a colony sim . You don't build your custom residence here, you build a village. Although my playtime for this review is quite low, I've participated in the latest beta and demos, so I believe I have a solid understanding of the game. Aska starts off slow. Some demo players have criticized the early pacing of the game, so let me draw the inevitable analogy to Dark Souls. In Souls-like games, there is a satisfying relief when you finally defeat a boss blocking your progress. In Aska, you have to prepare the ground for a building, fell and process trees on your own, and go through multiple steps to construct a single shelter. This can be cumbersome. However, after some time, you build your "Eye of Odin," which allows you to summon your first villager. When this handsome Viking appears, he will automatically carry sticks, logs, and stones to the building site and start construction. Congratulations, you've defeated the first "boss", and the satisfaction fills you as you watch your new pawn taking care of the annoying stuff. The process to get your first villager will take only minutes on your second attempt. This is likely why it was not adjusted: once you've acquired the skills as a player, things go much more smoothly. From this point onward, you gather more villagers, and your role shifts from crafter to manager. However, the challenges remain. The blood moon rises, winter approaches, and worst of all, bloody Smolkr steal your hard-earned food. Now that you have a solid grasp of the core gameplay loop, let me share a few things I love about Aska: [*]Most resources are physically anchored in the world. Sticks you gather are on your back, and logs are carried on your shoulder. [*]It's extremely satisfying to watch one villager fell and process a tree, another carry it to your stockpile, and a third pick it up to build a house. [*]The game is challenging but not stressful. Regular attacks do leave room for idling and exploration. [*]The graphics are decent. Not mind-blowing, but well-suited to this game. As far as I know, no assets are bought, everything was purposefully crafted for this game. [*]There are already enough decorations and buildings to create a lively and detailed village. [*]The islands are randomly generated, offering some replay value. [*]Boats seem to open up new possibilities, but I haven't been there yet. While it's no secret that I love this game, there are a few areas for improvement. Some might even be dealbreakers for you, so you might want to wait a bit before purchasing: [*]The combat is stiff and awkward. However, I did enjoy using the bow. [*]Currently, there are only two playable characters with minimal customization. [*]No dedicated servers mean the host of your shared save must be online when you want to play. [*]Trees currently don't regrow, though I imagine this is an easy fix. Thanks for reading my review, and by Odin, please keep an eye on those Smolkrs. Let me tell you, they are up to something . You have been warned!
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 03 December 2024 00:43 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 18 December 2024 08:08 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 12:50 |
| Steam reviews | 23 December 2024 15:57 |
Online players
705
Developer
Sand Sailor Studio
Publisher
Thunderful Publishing
Release
20 Jun 2024
Platforms
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