From city building to grand strategy, turn-based tactics to RTS, see more strategy games from Hooded Horse.
Sons of Valhalla combines side-scrolling combat with roguelike strategy and base building in a beautiful pixel-art Viking Age world. You play as Thorald Olavson, a warrior hell-bent on t...
From city building to grand strategy, turn-based tactics to RTS, see more strategy games from Hooded Horse.
Sons of Valhalla combines side-scrolling combat with roguelike strategy and base building in a beautiful pixel-art Viking Age world. You play as Thorald Olavson, a warrior hell-bent on tracking down the Jarl who burned down his home, kidnapped his beloved, and fled to distant England.
Raise a warband and personally lead your troops in a grand saga of vengeance as the gods themselves watch over you.
Across the North Sea, far from home, hunting your nemesis down will take resources, soldiers, and strategic thinking. Manage limited funds as you choose your path down the English countryside, battling, besieging, and bargaining for equipment as you call for reinforcements from home, leaving a trail of corpses in your wake.
Branching paths lie before you as a raging storm chases your band from the north. Travel from town to town to seek out merchants, mercenaries, and violence – from epic sieges to skirmishes on open fields.
Double back, skip past, and revisit locations as your plans call for it – in Sons of Valhalla, points of interest on the map aren’t locked to you because you’ve already marched past them! Will you return to an armorer that sold powerful equipment that you couldn’t yet afford? Perhaps the local castle may be beyond your strength when you first arrive, but with clever maneuvering, you can add to your forces and return later? As the storm slowly envelops the land, distant towns may become unreachable – choose your advance wisely.
Resources earned on the battlefield can be used to purchase equipment, upgrade your troops, and even build structures and siege engines to aid in your efforts. Set aside, these same resources can be used at the various merchants to further your capabilities beyond any single engagement. Plan how you use your limited supplies with care, or see a quick end to your invasion.
Lead your men in tactical combat by issuing orders and utilizing special abilities and formations. But remember – a true warrior leads from the front, so be prepared to take up your sword to fight alongside your men.
Recruit a wide array of troops to fight by your side – from basic swordsmen and archers to unique champions such as combat blacksmiths and shieldmaidens, each comes with their own strengths and weaknesses. Success in battle comes from using the right troops for the right situation. Will you utilize the shaman for their healing powers to keep your troops fighting for longer, or is the rapid swinging of the berserker more your speed?
Command your troops to overcome evolving situations on the battlefield – order them to fall in line behind you, to charge forward, to retreat, or to form the impregnable shield wall when under a hail of arrows. Quick thinking, positioning, and army composition all play a major role in battle.
Break through the enemy shield wall and cut them down with your own blade or become a master of the bow and spear as you destroy your enemy from a distance. Purchase powerful equipment to aid you on the battlefield and down flasks of mead to maintain your fortitude as you stand with your men, protect their retreats, and lead their assaults.
You are not alone in your war of vengeance. As you set England ablaze, Odin himself supports your cause with strength from beyond Midgard to aid you in combat.
Acquire runestones as you engage in battle and sacrifice them to Odin to permanently unlock powerful warriors and equipment for future runs. In Sons of Valhalla, death will have you lose everything and start your invasion anew, but with Odin’s help, each subsequent attempt will see you grow stronger and stronger as you pursue justice.
Sons of Valhalla is the creation of two brothers with a passion for pixel art and the Viking Age. In-between the conquest and swordplay, we hope you will enjoy the little touches – the look of the buildings, the ducks swimming on water, your canine companion, and the general atmosphere as days turn to nights, sunshine to storms.
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Why buy on GOG.COM?
DRM FREE. No activation or online connection required to play.
For some it may be very obvious this game is trying to look very much like Kingdom games (Kingdom Two Crowns being most famous). It creates a particular impression which is very misleading as this game is nowhere like that and I mean that both in terms of gameplay and also in terms of vibe, spirit, magic, call it what you like but also in terms of attention to detail, simplicity and brilliance.
It's mostly combat oriented RTS strategy that always plays from left to right.. at least the first 3 maps of what seems to be 6 in total but I might be wrong, I didn't play the rest. The gameplay gets old quickly as it's not really a matter of wit or strategy and once you figure it out there's not much sense in variation though you get new units unlocked with each new map as you progress. The resource system in the game is also just a fake impression of having sense. In the end it's all about coins that you can get only by time passing actually. It's rather difficult to control which is bothersome for a "strategy" game. At the end of each map is a souls-like boss fight and I find it very odd that the second level boss is way way easier that the first one even without all the level-ups you get from the second level. Writing, voiceover, story and all is just cheap filling. I find the whole idea wrong from the beginning to execution.
Pros:
- Graphic style (stolen from Kingdoms games)
Cons:
- Graphics have different pixel resolutions in different parts which I always find quite disturbing. Even the fonts have improper uneven scale and some parts are two "pixels" thick at some sides while having one pixel at other side. Ugh!
- Uninspired game design
- Complicated controls in simple environment
- Over-simplistic base building, mostly the pointless resource gathering part
- Trying to be something that it's not
I loved the Kingdom games and just had to play a similar game - at least what I thought. I got quite disappointed since this game had basically no similarities at all apart from the lack of y-axis movement.
I loved the graphics and the weather changing though, but spending 23 dollars for this was just a bit too much. It was not really a bad game and I finished the whole game. It was short and quite repetitive. I like the general idea, but it lacked all the fun from the Kingdom games. Building and upgrading buildings to level 3 in 10 seconds was not really fun. And enemies basically never destroyed any building. I played on normal mode and I think they went past my barrier once or twice.
Towers were quite useless and there were really clumsy controls and not really much to do.
I spent 10-11 hours on this game before I finished it and I don't regret it, but I feel a bit robbed from my expectations and money.
You can buy it when it's $9 or something, but don't expect it to be even close to the Kingdom games. This is something completely different.
I gave it around 1h30m of play time and died once. After that death, I just asked myself if I was having fun or not. When I revived and went to step back to the fight, I opted to instead quit and refund this title.
The graphics are nice, the story would've been interesting, but the gameplay is where it takes tumble and faceplants the ground. Warriors going beyond the walls is necessary but healers? They'll run out into the thick of things and give up their lives (and resources) in order to exhaust their stamina.
I enjoyed the aspect of Kingdom: Classic and its side-scrolling gameplay. However, when the game relies on you spending resources on units it becomes a heavy waiting game in the beginning which is where most of the playtime will come in. Sloooooowly wait for the fish and wood to creep in, buy something, then waaaaaaiiiiiiitt, buy one more unit, then a bit mooooooore wwaaaaiiiiting.
I'd get it when it is much, MUCH cheaper. If I had bought this at full price I would've been livid.
Meh, replay value is nominal and Raya's Escape offers little to add to the gameplay and story overall. I've gone through similar games before and there's nothing here that shines above others, not that anything shone to begin with.
I wanted to like this game; I really did. The BASE difficulty and combat depth is solid, the content has enough variety in enemies and items to not feel repetitive, and the art/music is great. The story is fine.
But the pacing and higher difficulty levels, man!
Even after the latest big update/overhaul (which is when and why I bought the game), I now keenly understand why people complained about too much repetition. It doesn't matter if battles are challenging or easy; after playing through about 30 battles over 9 hours, I was READING A BOOK while letting battles play out on auto-pilot. (Easy is fine sometimes, but I want to be engaged!) A good chunk of the game's complexity and engagement is playing as a hero/commander alongside your troops, but when I'm hacking at a ram for a good 2-3 minutes in a Defense mission, left-clicking non-stop... well. That ain't fun.
Or take another example: a "Hold the hill" mission type. Fun, right? You hold for X minutes. Except higher difficulty means the "X minutes" becomes upward of 15 minutes with no input needed from you because a turtle formation + catapults does just dandy. (This is where I read a book.)
Higher difficulty in general? Enemies multiply AND become HP sponges, forcing either the meta shield wall turtle strategy, or burning tons of resources to chuck endless troops of your own out to die, both options of which are... not very stimulating to manage.
In short, this game suffers from unimaginative difficulty scaling (which is practically necessary to go up for for operating cash) which causes boredom, dovetailed with too few tactical options or viable strategies to maintain engagement.
There is ONE army composition/tactic that outshines all others: shield wall + 1-2 healers + catapults + whatever flavor of DPS support (berserks, pyros, archers, doesn't matter). Enough said.
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