Review: ASKA

Developer – Sand Sailor Studio

Publisher – Thunderful Publishing

Platforms –  PC (Reviewed)

Review copy given by Developer

ASKA is a new third-person survival game in early access that was released on Steam the past month. You are a Viking that has washed ashore after being attacked by a huge monster out at sea. Right from the start you are fighting for your survival and together with your Viking brethren you summon along the way, you will have to build a successful village that will allow everyone to survive and defend themselves against nature and Nordic based entities. Really the only survival game I’ve spent any significant time with has been Valheim, so I was interested in giving ASKA a shot to see if it could capture me the way it did. Keeping in mind that this game is in early access, there are a few rough edges that will eventually be worked out so we have to examine that foundation the game is built upon.

One of the major differences as mentioned above is the settlement management aspect of the game, each village you summon with Jotun blood will have its own unique traits and abilities that will make them a natural at certain tasks and not so great at others. In a way it sort of reminds me of Age of Empires but much more involved in the process at a very detailed level. The villages are builders by default and they will help you create your village as you see fit. After the buildings are finished you can assign certain villages to start tasks at those structures. For instance when you build a Woodcutter’s Pit, the assigned village will become a woodcutter themselves and help gather those resources to help your village thrive.

Of course, outside of the survival and building aspects, there are combat systems where you have to defeat monsters. You have to be careful when building your village and navigating around the world because you will have to defend your village from attacking monsters that spawn in and can wreak havoc upon your base and villagers. If you have a massive attack on your people, you can spend hours putting everything back together. The game requires a lot of time and patience for things to come together and that on top of a clunky UI can make the game feel like a slog sometimes. While you can assign your villagers to do a lot of the work the AI isn’t really the best at doing all the work unattended, but I think that this is mainly due to it being early access. Gathering food, water, supplies to keep everything running smoothly can be a repetitive task but this is where having villagers can really come in handy to help relieve some of these tasks, so hopefully they will get some of the issues worked out soon to make this a more intuitive system. In terms of the world as it is, it felt a bit empty at the time that I was playing and the combat system was also relatively basic. 

Technically, the game runs well. I did try the game on my Steam Deck and would avoid playing this on Steam Deck. It is playable but even at the lowest settings, it is quite rough. Sometimes the game would dip below 20 FPS and it would become much harder to play. Overall, ASKA has a pretty decent foundation. The mechanics are all there, it has a good system with the villagers and a built-in co-op as well. With a little bit more fine tuning over the next few months, I think that ASKA can hold its own against some of the more established survival games out there currently. The current price for the game is $25, which for the amount of content is a pretty fair price. I can see people wanting to wait just a bit longer for the developers to polish the game just a bit more and add more things to explore and fill out the world before investing their time. Personally, I look forward to diving back into the game a bit more after a few more updates and will post a follow up review as these updates are released.