Valhalla Hills is the new building strategy game developed by Funatics which combines the winning combination of Vikings and SIM City into one loveable game. It’s a recent release and is available via Steam for all to enjoy the pillaging and destruction that comes with Viking culture. I have to say that this is a strange game to review because it has so much potential and overall was fantastic (except for a few little problems that I’ll get to below).
Our story begins with Odin, the Viking chief god who has decided to become a huge jerk to people because he’s having baby issues. Turns out his little bundle of joy has taken an interest in creating things rather than just getting wasted and destroying as much as he possibly can, a bit of a contrast to my own life. Naturally rather than setting up a University fund for the kid to become an architect, mainly because from what I imagine Valhalla’s University prospects aren’t too great unless you want a degree in slaughtering, drinking or pillaging, Odin decides to banish his child from Valhalla, Viking heaven, and lock the doors to anyone who has spent their life doing the good and moral thing by setting fire to villages and murdering innocent people, because that’s what gets you into heaven if you’re a Viking.
Your task now is to build settlements for your little minions and with that, grow them to become strong enough to force their way through the portals and into Valhalla, doing this grants you and your Vikings honour which again grants a free pass into Viking heaven by shoving your honour straight down Odin’s throat. It’s a pretty simple concept really but hey, it’s a building strategy game so you don’t really need any epic plot lines or twists in it. I mean, it would be pretty weird if you were playing SIM City: Cluedo Edition.
Throughout the course of the game you’ll unlock new things such as buildings and challenges and a heap of other stuff. This really just works as your typical building game. You level up and in doing so you unlock more buildings to unlock more things so that you can level up and unlock more buildings and more things so that you can level up so th… You get the point. The buildings that you unlock can provide some useful things though, and you may not necessarily need them but they can be quite useful to have when the time comes.
The graphics, in my opinion, are the best thing about this game. They have an almost cartoony look about them which is strange for a building strategy game, since most of them are advertised on television 24-7 by blondes with huge breasts taking baths whilst their village is destroyed, then getting dressed in the most impractical armour I’ve ever seen but hey it’s okay because their breasts are still on show. I’m really not sure how that is an advertisement for a building strategy game but if you watch any television channel then you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. The developers went through a lot to get the graphics on this game as good as they are and they did a pretty decent job in doing just that. The environments are well designed, the huts and buildings are all detailed and culturally relevant and the Vikings look unique, so you can actually tell which Viking is which (+1 as there are so many copy and paste games out there). Without sounding too much like Lenny from of Mice and Men, I have to say the rabbits are the best and I had a lot of fun watching them run around and making my own imaginary episodes of Viking Loony Tunes.
The sound is good but overly repetitive. It’s not exactly a bad thing as I wasn’t expecting to hear Blink 182 rocking away on this game, but it can be a little bit frustrating when you have the same rotation of song playing over and over again. That being said the sound effects are pretty good and I can tell that the sound artists have spent time working to perfect them for this game.
There are a few issues that I have with the game, one of the more frustrating things about this is that you can’t specifically control each individual thing. All of your settlers just kind of go with the flow, which is all well and good but it wound me up quite a bit. For instance, in order to get to the next stage I had to get through the portal stone. So because I had so much wood I wanted to share it with Odin so he’d grant me access to his heaven (did you enjoy the euphemism there?). I built an offering shrine where I could give him my wood but the villager who was supposed to take it there kept wandering backwards and forth, but because all the logs had been placed in my woodcutters cabin a few inches away, he wouldn’t take them. Apparently that wood wasn’t good enough for Odin, who I would assume would probably just banish the wood anyway since that’s just the kind of guy he is.
So after that I decided to force my way into Valhalla and created my own little Viking army which I had a lot of fun pretending that they were a fan club of Gimli from Lord of the Rings, but because I couldn’t specifically give my army axes that I had made they kept going to other members of the tribe which meant a few of my warriors had to go Fight Club style, to which I built the camp fire too far away from where the war was going on and most of my villagers were immediately destroyed by the warriors of Valhalla because they had no armour, but they did have woodcutting axes so it was like the equivalent of giving a chicken a spoon and making it fight a bear.
Furthermore, the tutorial is a little bit slow, each level gives you some new information but I still didn’t really have a clue what I was doing. I knew what all the huts did but didn’t really know much about the villagers or what I was supposed to do, so I spent the first stage chopping as much wood as I could handle only to find out that I didn’t actually need any of it. The problem with this is that I am like 99.99% of gamers out that in the fact that I don’t read things, I learn by doing them and if I only get one chance to read what I’m supposed to do then you can guarantee that I’ll miss it and then vent my frustration on the little pixelated Vikings by sending them to their deaths.
Understandably these two issues are more of an experience thing in the fact that if you keep playing the game then you will know exactly what to do and you’ll have a great time doing lots of cool neat things that you never thought possible. Gamers are impatient though and most gamers want to do extremely cool stuff from the very beginning and even cooler stuff when they get to know the game more. My favourite example of this is Borderlands because in the first 2 minutes of the game you know how to run, walk, jump, crouch, shoot, aim, hand in quests, read the map, check your health, open the menu and begin being awesome and frankly that’s about 99% of what the game involves and that’s when the game turns around and sends you on your way to sink and swim but shortly after you get a sweet new skill and begin unlocking new little bits and bobs to help you become even more overpowered and awesome.
The game as a whole is great and somewhat addictive to say the least. It’s an amazing concept on paper and the flaws that I could find are very easily fixed, which if done would make this game perfect. The graphics speak for themselves as does the sound, and the game play is fun and can be challenging when it needs to be. Overall I’d say that if you enjoy building games such as SIM City then give it a try as you will more than likely spend many hours of your precious life wrecking havoc across the hills of Valhalla. Personally I prefer this to SIM City as it has a bit more of a light hearted feel to it and I don’t have to build Odin millions of power plants because his TV’s stopped working, but then again I can’t crush the Vikings with meteorites so we’ll call it a draw.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
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