What a great idea to combine Roguelites with metaprogression with a Tower Defence game! It has challenging but fun achievements. Nothing is missable, and completion takes around 15 hours or less.
Approximate amount of time to 100%: around 15 hours or less
Estimated achievement difficulty: 4/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: Many runs, as usual in a roguelite
Is there a good guide available: for the most part you don’t need a guide, but there is a good guide in the Steam guides section to set you up for beating wave 30 on thee normal difficulty after you unlocked most meta progression
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: Yes, for the “ranking” achievements you need to play on normal
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
What is Nordhold an addictive game! A Tower Defence combined with roguelite including the meta progression. At the beginning, you’ll be quite weak with limited options. However, you earn a lot of the meta-progression currency, and that will open up all sorts of things, like new towers (8 different ones in total), buffs, and new buildings with each their own function. I love how easy it was to earn the meta progression credits and that you can even spend it during the current run. It still will take a while to unlock everything but it felt rewarding to keep going and unlocking stuff.
It can be annoying that your city starts weak every game, but on the other hand, it allows you to build it differently each time and lean into the way you plan to play this new run. I always started kinda the same way, but for the last run I did to finish the last achievement, I used the guide to setup a good start for beating 30 waves on the normal difficulty and I saw things there I never even thought about as a starting setup. It is great you can play in different ways, with different towers. Also, the buffs you select at the beginning of a new run lean into play a certain way.
One of the many things I love is that the area to defend is different with each run. Sometimes it was easier because the area became more like an S shape, so towers could defend on multiple sides, and on other runs it was a bit harder because it was just a long line, or a bunch of branches opening up at the same time which creates a lot of enemies around the same time while if they would be further a[art, there would be more distance between enemies which makes it easier for your towers to kill the enemies.
The game starts quite hard, as you only have the normal difficulty and not much meta progression unlocked, however it seems that after failing a lot of time a lower difficulty unlocks and even if you keep failing that difficulty there is a lower difficulty below that. Most of the achievements can be done on the easier difficulties as well, only the ranking achievements have to be done on normal.
Speaking about the achievements, Nordhold has no missable achievements. It takes around 15 hours or less to complete them. I love how they have so many different kind of achievements. For example win a game with only the basic tower, but also win a run without using the basic tower (which was so much harder than I expected). Also, win a game with only 1 health point left. That last one sounds luck-based but doesn’t have to be: if you choose a buff at the start, which costs a health every wave, and then later pick up the item to get 10 more health, or if you can’t find that, use the druid house to 2x increase the health you’ll easily get this as long as no enemy damages your city. At this moment, the achievements are all so doable, even for a gamer who doesn’t have much experience with tower defense games. However, other players have asked for achievements for the higher difficulties. Personally, I hope they won’t add new achievements, as it always kinda sucks to have to return to a game you had previously on 100%, but I also understand why they asked for it.
I give Nordhold 4.5 out of 5 stars. Such an addictive spin in the roguelite genre!
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This review for Nordhold was written on 1 April 2025, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 32 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.
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