Valhalla Hills

[Played on Steam / refunded] I tried to like this game. It has a lot of things that I generally like in a city/village building sim. But the zoom/pan mechanics are inexplicably strange and jarring and got to the point where they nearly made me nauseous. Specifically... When you use the mouse wheel to zoom out or in, it doesn't just change the height/perspective of your view, it shift it to one side, seemingly at random. I could never figure out if it was trying to focus on something "important" at the new zoom level. So imagine that every time you zoom in or out, the camera also randomly "bumps" about 30-degrees to one side or the other. Very distracting/annoying. If that gets fixed, I might give it another try.

The game feels like a combo of The Settlers (III mostly), the old classic The Wiggles and Reus (in terms of the unlocks system). It also features a really neat map-generation system. Overally, the impression is really good, so if you are into the Settlers' kind of RTS, give VH a go :-) However, one of the most disappointing aspect is the technical stuff. The game seems clumsy when it comes to fonts, the camera control scheme is weird at best and and graphic style, while quite unique and pleasurable, seems a little outdated :-( Still, I would encourage getting it, but maybe not for the full price.

I had high hopes for this game, but it's been all for nothing. The game makes you collect honor for a group of vikings who were denied entry to Valhalla. Sounds like fun, right? Well... sounds. And that's about it. You are pushed into a number of frozen wasteland islands where only a tiny plot of land is possible to farm, monsters scattered around so your hunters have high chance of dying instead of bringing food. The little green area gets placed in an impossible to use area (must collect stones and/or chop down trees to use it) Before you manage that, your people get too hungry to work, soldiers starve to death and fall. And all that before you even kill your first enemies in the area! If I wanted to play "feed me now" simulator I'd buy a tamagotchi. To add an insult to the injury, the game can't figure out which screen to use and won't resize to my main screen resolution anyway.

Disclaimer: Negative vibes.... This game feels like Populous combined with some flavors of Cultures and Settlers, mixed up with a viking theme resulting in a very very very poor game. The game is BTW quite heavy on the GPU, which is pitty because this game isn't that good looking...(?) Anyway, the game is full with glitches, the music is so soft (muted?) you can't hear it, so you have to adjust the sound options; and after you've got the sound and music leveld you discover that the music is quite enoying and repeative.. The game itself is at the first looks pritty nice; however, after the first 2 (tutorial) levels, you start to see how boring the game actually is, everything is the same, same, same... The camera or the angle of the view is just a bit weird to my taste, and you can't move around, or at least I didn't found a way to do so. (and that is part of the problem... I didn't care to find / figure it out) I lost interest in the game after 2 hours, gave it another spin the next day, but uninstalled it after the second try. The only positive thing I can think of for this game is the UI-scaling, which is for me a bonus. (but that is personal, and I guess most people don't give a crap about that feature anyway). Verdict; the game is boring, anoying music, repeative, and feels somewhat unfinished...