Valhalla Hills Review (PC)

Valhalla Hills will remind many older gamers of titles like The Settlers and Culture, which is the normal given that the development team that creates the new Viking driven experience had a hand in the creation of both those already classic titles.

The game is developed by Funatics Software and is published by Daedalic Interactive, with the title only offered on the PC at the moment.

The entire game is built around optimization, with gamers asked to carefully control the movement of their characters and the location of their buildings to create communities that can thrive and exploit the environment around them.

Valhalla Hills manages to walk a fine line between excessive complexity, which is always a temptation for the city-building genre, and a lack of variety and is suited both for long-term fans of the main mechanics and for those who discover them for the first time.

Story

Valhalla Hills is a game about the price of non-violence, with gamers taking control of a young son of Odin, named Leko, who was more focused on building than on fighting and incurred the wrath of his father, who cast him down to Earth and closed the gates of the Norse paradise behind him.

Now the lowly builder god needs to use the spirits of the fallen Viking heroes to create a powerful force and march up towards the mountain where the rest of the deities exist to force his father to let those deserving in once again.

It's a relatively flimsy story, and it never evolves too much as the player engages with the title, but the main narrative thread, the core mechanics and the look of Valhalla Hills are well synchronized with one another.

Valhalla Hills roads

The small, weirdly moving Vikings make for cute central characters, even if they do not have too much to say about their situation and prefer to focus on their immediate needs, mainly hunger, and on the need to reach Asgard as quickly as possible.

Funactics Software should have tried to open up the narrative a little to make the player more invested in the destinies of those he is controlling because, as it stands, it's easy to abandon the game because it fails a solid hook to keep the player engaged.

Gameplay

Valhalla Hills is a city-building strategy game that focuses on resource extraction and management, with a limited focus on classic combat and a focus on the ways players can constantly improve the efficiency of their settlement.

Initially gamers only have to deal with a small number of Vikings and a limited number of buildings and resources, but in a few hours a lot of unlocking increases the complexity level exponentially and reveals a title that is all about finding ways to optimize placement and movement.

The goal is, despite the building focus of Leko, very militaristic as some soldiers need to be mustered and equipped in order deal with the monsters that guard a portal that will allow the tribe to move a little closer to the gods that banished them.

There's also an option to appease them with sacrifices via altars, with an equal level of complexity, for those who do not want any violence in their strategy experience.

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The warriors will need to have solid weapons as well as access to beer and gold, and those, in turn, require other resources and tools to be produced in large enough quantities.

Each other citizen in turn has a set of stats that affect his will to work and perform as a true Viking should.

Gamers will have to manage the range of the various buildings and the movement of those employed by each to make sure that wood is cut, transformed into planks, moved to the builders and then to higher level producers, to mention just one supply chain that a successful settlement requires.

The maps are procedurally generated, and that means buildings spots are often at a premium and it's almost impossible to create a perfect village without prioritizing one resource over another, which means that the military men often get all they need while others tend to suffer from hunger from time to time.

I tend to put up a basic set of buildings relatively quickly to make sure that I get the economy going early on, without trying to make sure that everything runs perfectly from the start, and then refine the entire system as I see where the bottlenecks are.

The Vikings are ill-equipped to deal with distractions (they often stop from tasks to chit-chat) and careful placement is important but needs to be supplemented by the creation of paths to guide them around the settlement as they try to accomplish their designated tasks.

The Artificial Intelligence that powers the workers in Valhalla Hills is a little weird and unpredictable, with some of the characters solving their tasks quickly and efficiently while others seem unable to accomplish anything.

The process of putting together a village that works well and can supply the army or the temples with all the resources needed is enjoyable, especially given that players have the option to speed up time when tasks need to be completed and their intervention is no longer required.

But, as it happens with more varied titles like Pharaoh, Valhalla Hills tends to become repetitive and fails to spice up the end-game in any significant way, expanding the mechanics rather than changing any of them in any significant manner.

“It's nice to see Vikings moving around the map, accomplishing their tasks, running an efficient settlement, but there's not enough variety in the core mechanics to stay engaged in the long-term.”

The city builder genre needs a little more innovation, a twist that can separate modern releases from the classic, and Valhalla Hills does not have that spark although it has a solid set of ideas that are well implemented.

The title should be enjoyed in relatively short sessions, maybe one map per sitting, in order to keep the mechanics fresh in the long-term.

Graphics and audio

Valhalla Hills aims for cuteness, and that involves a very storybook art style, with the characters sometimes looking more like dwarves than Vikings and buildings that look like they are taken out of The Smurfs at times.

The day and night cycle, abbreviated as it is and enhanced by the triple speed setting, manages to deliver some pretty interesting sights and some beautiful moments, but I spent most of my time a little zoomed out and close to the settlement so that I can track the movements of my Vikings and how they accomplish their goals.

The interface of Valhalla Hills is informative, and it is easy to put down buildings and to see how they affect the world, but the development team could have delivered a little more detail when it comes to the world and the characters.

The sound design of the game is less impressive than the graphics, with a soundtrack that involves Scandinavian themes but fails to deliver any catchy songs and with a distinct lack of actual voice for the Vikings that tends to limit the immersion.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion