Cultures

                      Reviewed by Sue

It's a good sign when I get so hooked on a game that I can't tear
myself away from it to write a review. It hasn't happened very
often and I'm thrilled when it does. Thank heavens for Cultures, a
demo of which arrived from Zenobi Software some time ago and was
reviewed in Issue 71. I loved the demo and thought it was an
up-coming game but it turned out to be from last year. I looked
everywhere for the full game but strangely it was nowhere to be
seen in the shops, until I went to Bromley one day and found a
copy (cut price, no less) in Game.

To recap the story for anyone who didn't read my previous piece,
basically Cultures is a Settlers-type game where you control a
group of Vikings. Thankfully the full game is every bit as good as
the demo. The Vikings' village has been hit by bad weather and a
poor harvest. The rain just keeps falling. Then suddenly the sun
appears and zooms across the sky. But a piece breaks off and falls
towards an elderly man. Other parts of the sun fall to other parts
of the Earth so the Vikings set off to find them, reunite the sun
and bring warmth back to the world.

The main campaign is a collection of missions built round their
search. They start in their small village in Greenland before
heading to America. These scenarios are a nice introduction to the
game because they get progressively more complicated.  You will
learn about food production, trading and exploration.  There has
so far only been a small amount of fighting, nothing too taxing.

There are also 12 scenarios, some of which have no particular goal
but others have a purpose eg find the thieves who have stolen from
the Vikings or support the Gods in their final battle against the
forces of evil. The same tutorials are on the full game as were in
the demo and these deal with the real basics of the game.

As I'd played the demo, I didn't work my way through the tutorials
again but got stuck straight into the missions. I'm currently
playing the one called The Crater where the bad guys, the
Vinlanders, have the largest piece of sunstone that you've seen so
far in a temple in the middle of a crater and the Vikings must
destroy the temple and get the sunstone. This won't be a trivial
task as the temple is surrounded by fiercely painted warriors.

I won't go too much into the basics of Cultures as I already did
this in Issue 71. But having played the game pretty solidly since
last issue, I've discovered a lot more depth than I'd at first
realised, especially as I hadn't really fully explored some facets
of the game in the demo.

One is the use of signposts. Vikings evidently have little sense
of direction - goodness knows how they found their way across the
Atlantic! If you don't want them to get lost, you will have to
instruct a scout to create a network of signposts which the
Vikings will travel between. The signposts also tell you what
items (food, oil, wood etc) are available within the signpost's
immediate area.


Just occasionally a Viking will get stuck or confused. I found
during one mission that the Viking who was designated as the iron
smelter was hanging about outside a warehouse saying he'd found
equipment. But it seemed impossible to get him to go to into his
workshop and actually do any work. I tried removing, then
reinstating, his workplace. I also noticed that his carrier, the
Viking who fetches his raw materials and then takes what he
produces to a warehouse, was also standing about idly. In the end,
the only thing which seemed to do the trick was to demolish the
iron ore mine and rebuild it - it was as though this woke the pair
of them up ... strange.

Talking of demolishing buildings, that's quite an interesting
point. If you raze a building, the items which went to make it AND
all its contents are left in a pile of charred embers. This is
handy in several ways. Firstly it means that building materials
are never lost. Secondly if the Vikings should get short of food,
you can destroy a house which contains food and its food will then
be available to all. Thirdly, once you can build 3 family houses,
you can destroy the smaller ones, It works in a similar way when
you release a soldier back to civilian life, his equipment is left
in the barracks. A nice bit of recycling.

There is a bit of fighting in Cultures but so far the baddies have
only attacked the Vikings if they've encroached on their ground.
This may change in later missions but so far it means that you can
take your time with the missions and really build up your forces
before attacking. One thing I found disturbing is that if you have
to destroy the Vinlanders in a mission, you don't just destroy
their defence towers and the places where they train their
warriors. You don't just kill the swordsmen and spearmen and
archers. You have to destroy and kill everyone, man, woman and
child. Since part of the point of Cultures is that all the Vikings
are named and distinguishable from each other, I found this very
worrying, especially when they're trying to get away and your
archers coolly pick them off.

There are a few minor irritations. Maybe I build my tribes too
large but I found that quite soon the Vikings' names were
repeating so I had things like two Bjarnis, two Gests and three
Hfafns. The women's name repeat even quicker, which is surprising
as there are fewer of them (I usually ended up with about 5 men to
each woman). On the other hand, the Vinlanders' names are great -
what about He Who Got Twenty Scars, Winking Eye and Olla Badolla!?

There were certain parts of the game when the grammar was awful. I
always got the message that, for instance, "Gunnlaug is building a
A bakery and is carrying a a stone" or "Alf is repairing the a
defence tower". Why the repetition? Why did no-one notice?! Or why
didn't they fix it? The game is originally German but this is a
simple piece of translation.

When the time comes to stop playing, the "Are you sure?"  message
is much more amusing than most. "Yes, my husband wants to play,"
it will say, or "Yes, but I'll be back", "Yes, it's late", or
"Yes, I think somebody tries to break into my house."  (Dodgy
grammar again but never mind). The alternative is "No, how dare
you ask me this". Sadly the effect of some of the longer "Yes"
boxes is marred by the fact that they overlap the "No" box. Sloppy

again and surely someone MUST have noticed it but for some reason
it was never fixed.

These moans aside, Cultures is a great game. The Vikings are very
cute and the design has a lot of humour in it. There's always
something to watch. The personalities of the Vikings shine through
as they carry items about their village, chat to each other or
scan the horizon for enemies. Highly recommended.











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