City builder games have had quite of a comeback for the past few years, most notably with the release of Cities: Skylines 2. Most of the games have been playing it safe with very little deviations in the formula, that's why I was glad to see that Roots of Yggdrasil is a Roguelike city builder set in Nordic mythology. If the genre mash up sounds weird to you, it kind of is, until you get used to it.

The main objective of the game is, build different structures to get different resources to get to the Yggdrasil seed, each island you'll need a different amount of seeds with different objectives on how to unlock said seeds. You start with the basic deck of cards, and every time your population gets to a certain milestone you can draft a new one - a new building. The gameplay loop was surprisingly fun because there's no downtime like in most city builder games. You're not waiting for stuff to happen or to get enough resources, every turn you can do something, and that makes the gameplay feel more fluid and fast paced.

After a tutorial you get introduced to the hub world, the main place where you can see how the roguelike part of the game works. You have the skill tree in which you can spend currency gained from exploring islands to get some permanent bonuses, the codex which tells you about all the characters you meet on your journeys and the workshop which lets you put different structures down that will help you in future runs, for example houses will start you off with more population, taverns with more supplies etc.

The visuals in this game are beautiful, its a simplistic art style but it works so great with the game this is trying to be. Think of it as a more simplistic Hades art style. When you're on the islands though, doing the city building stuff, it can look kind of bland, but to be honest it's not a big deal, since you're rarely gonna have downtime to look around and notice the details since, as I said, you're not gonna be waiting on resources. The sound design is nothing to write home about, but it's not bad either - it serves its purpose. 

So the general loop of the game is as follows. Start a new run with a random generation of events and islands. Travel to said islands and/or events, spending turns the further you travel. Events could be anything, from adding/removing cards, to having a buff/debuff or getting an artifact which is a passive buff that lasts until the end of the run. You land on the islands and get the specified number of seeds. Rinse and repeat until you either die to the storm that keeps following you and that appears if you're on an island for too long, or until you finish the run and get back to the hub island.

The story of the game is also passable, but it serves its purpose. You are in Ragnarok and are trying to get to the top of the world tree - Yggdrasil. To be honest, the gameplay carries this game. As it has that "one more run" feeling since the runs are usually around 20 minutes long, depending on how many islands you land on and how fast you finish them. But I really found that the gameplay loop, with some slight refining, could be really addicting and could possible put this game up as one of the better Roguelikes that came out this year.

The only real gripe I have with this game is not with the game itself, it's with the optimization of it. There's no vsync or setting the max fps, my game was constantly running at max fps it can while my PC fans were struggling to keep up because the game decided that it would be best to run at 400 fps with no way of changing it or limiting it. That is why most of my playtime was 30 minutes at a time. But that problem is easily fixable by the developers so I really hope they fix it when the game comes out.

7/10