As someone who's spent an excessive amount of time micromanaging entire civilizations, the industrious little rodents of Whiskerwood have to be the cutest critters I've ever lorded over. The adorable cat-and-mouse city builder puts you in charge of a fledgling mouse colony filled with hardworking, skilled laborers who don't seem to know they're the only thing of real value in the equation. Their only ask is that you meet their most basic needs—you know, food, shelter, clothing, the bare minimum kind of thing. But even that grows difficult as supplies run thin and your feline overlords keep demanding a bigger slice of the pie.

When times got tough, I figured my mousy subordinates would surely understand going to bed hungry a night or two. I didn't expect them to question it, nor did I think they would spread ugly rumors of my misgivings, further stoking rebellious fervor. Well, I say rumors, but yeah—I did overpay the monarchy several times in hopes of courting shiny infrastructure upgrades while leaving the mice to starve. I tried explaining that I thought this society was too cute to be of serious consequence, and that they really needed my useless governance negotiating days of food for a wind chime. I don't think they liked that.

Anyway, long story short, the mice revolted. And that's how my first city, New Gouda, fell in an impressive speedrun of societal collapse. I repeated my sins a few times before really getting the hang of it and accepting that Whiskerwood only looks like a warm and fuzzy city sim. In reality, it's a brutal balancing act of complex systems that demands you take your duty leading the Whiskers—its mousy proletariat—seriously.

Life on the procgen archipelago gets rough, but I finally established a successful colony with the founding of Brieton. I've had some close calls with the game's ruthless kitty monarchy, the Claws, though it's usually just firing a cannonball or two after I fail to pay taxes. It's a screw up that's (mostly) easy to fix, or at least it is when compared to the threat of colonial uprising that comes with betraying your workers. I'll occasionally get a little too excited and strain resources while making decorations, but it's not like aesthetic philosophy is an entirely useless concept here. The mice need a little joy in their surroundings.

The general flow, environmental fixtures, and setup of your colony are all factors just as important to keeping your island citizens happy as they are in city builder cousins like Cities Skylines, but Whiskerwood takes a zoomed-in look at a smaller populace. It's more akin to colony sims like Dwarf Fortress or RimWorld with a heavy focus on production chains, political conflict, and conquering harsh landscapes. The system gives me a chance to hone in on individual mice too, and when I find one that's particularly gifted and wired for productivity, I invest in advancing their talents.

It's all just a big cat-and-mouse balancing act, but I find the old adage "slow and steady wins the race" particularly helpful for surviving those first few weeks. I stick to the basics early on, keeping my population small while preparing for the first difficulty spike in winter. The cold snap is where things really took a turn for the worst in New Gouda and several of the attempts that followed. I wiped out half the island by making some mice sleep outside while I hoarded wealth for later investments. Despite Whiskerwood's flurry of tutorial warnings, I learned the hard way my colony couldn't get by on campfire heat alone. The surviving workers expressed grievances after seeing their dead, frozen neighbors, and well, you know the rest of the story.

The more I stew on my failures, the more I realize Whiskerwood is quite grim, but I will say some items and Whisker traits make me think a colony run by more competently negligent monarchists works fine. I haven't experimented with them yet, but I've researched some gross displays of wealth, like a golden feline statue meant to intimidate passing workers. I've also noticed some mice like to do a little class betrayal, but I've tried to keep those folks sequestered from my island. It's only acceptable when I'm the one exploiting the labor here.

Anyway, I've found enough success with the path that lets me rest my bourgeois head at night, and ethical motivations aside, profits from sloppy shortcuts in a society where mice don't have their most basic needs met won't last. The Claws always come back, beating down my door while asking the Whiskers to give up more for less.

It's all surprisingly robust for a game in early access, and I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible in its current state. I've yet to really push back on the monarchy, and mostly stick to paying its unfair tax rate in full and on time with zero bribery involved. I'm eager to see how far I can push the despots when I try to cut my island's over-reliance on their paltry supply shipments, but Brieton just got showers and warehouses bigger than a shoebox, so I don't think I'm anywhere close to that… yet.

The recent history of real-time strategy has been more dark age than golden era, but there have been a few bright spots over the last decade. One of those is Northgard, a Viking-themed RTS that was released in 2018. Built on traditional strategy foundations, Northgard added novel ideas like game-altering weather systems and a region-based expansion system.

The result is one of the best strategy games of the last decade. "While the inspiration is clear, it would be a disservice to imply that it's mainly trading in nostalgia," Fraser Brown wrote in his Northgard review, awarding it a score of 84%. "This Viking saga builds on the history-themed RTS romps of the '90s, but it's not beholden to them."

Northgard went on to sell over 5 million copies and receive a bunch of expansions and DLC. Now, developer Shiro Games has bundled several of these additional adventures with the base game to form Northgard: Definitive Edition, which throws in a few new features for good measure.

Chiefly, the Definitive Edition combines the base game with the Cross of Vidar expansion, which introduces a new campaign where you must guide your Viking Clan through new lands in a post Ragnarök world. On top of this, the Definitive Edition includes three DLC clans to play as. These are the guerilla specialists The Clan of the Snake, the brutal warlords The Clan of the Dragon, who use slavery and human sacrifice to control a population of rebellious thralls, and The Clan of the Horse, which revolves heavily around its two warchiefs, Brok and Eitria.

As for new stuff, the Definitive Edition primarily introduces a new Valhalla-themed biome for your Vikings to colonise. But it also rolls out several existing biomes previously exclusive to Northgard's Bifröst mode (a wave-based conquest mode that takes place across multiple realms) across other game modes. Finally, it reworks the game's shop and adds a digital artbook and art gallery.

The expansions and extras included in the Definitive Edition will be folded into Northgard as a free update to existing players. For those who don't own Northgard and are considering a purchase, Shiro Games is currently offering the Definitive Edition at a 60% discount, bringing the price down from the new RRP of $35 (£29.50) to $14 (£11.80). The discount ends on December 18.

Northgard isn't the only RTS to receive a major update this week. On Tuesday, Command & Conquer successor Tempest Rising added game-changing superweapons to every faction in the game. That includes the newly playable Veti faction, which developer Slipgate Ironworks is testing in a public beta for the next two weeks.