Cultures 2 (GOG)

A peaceful Greenland settlement becomes the starting point for a sprawling mythological campaign where Viking hero Bjarni receives a vision of disaster and sets out to challenge the Midgard Serpent. Cultures 2: Gates of Asgard blends real-time strategy with a surprisingly hands-on village simulation, sending its characters across England, Central Europe, Byzantium, and lands near Baghdad. Its tone is more colourful and storybook-like than grim, but the journey carries genuine stakes through Norse legends, political alliances, and a threat large enough to unite rival peoples. The package also includes the original Cultures, making it a substantial look at an older strategy series built around people rather than anonymous units.

Settlements run on detailed production chains: citizens harvest materials, build homes and roads, cook food, craft equipment, mine resources, and train into specialised professions. Rather than simply clicking a barracks and mass-producing an army, players manage individual workers with needs, skills, tools, and career paths, then decide which tasks deserve attention as each map’s economy grows. Campaign missions mix construction goals with exploration, trading, resource shortages, and military encounters, while heroes and quest objectives give the scenarios more direction than a standard skirmish map. Combat is accessible rather than especially tactical, so success usually comes from maintaining a capable workforce and supplying troops properly before conflict begins.

What separates Cultures 2 from more conventional RTS games is its almost dollhouse-like attention to everyday settlement life; watching a village’s many tiny specialists move through their routines remains the main reward. The old-school interface, deliberate pace, and sometimes demanding logistics show its age, yet they also give the game a methodical charm absent from faster modern strategy titles. Expect a lengthy campaign spread across both included games, with plenty of professions and maps that reward careful planning instead of frantic clicking. Fans of The Settlers, Anno’s economic side, or slower historical strategy games find much to enjoy here, while newcomers should arrive ready to learn a dense but satisfying management system.