Even on the easier levels I sometimes struggled to get the build order right and ended up watching the vikings starve to death because no one was getting enough food so no one wanted to work and they all stood around the campfires talking smack about me – despite the fact that I was screaming at the screen for one of them to: “just bloody well do something!” It’s not only the order of your buildings that you’ve got to watch out for though, as your lack of direct control over your minions means that you’ve got to trust that they’re going to do what you want them to especially if you start thinking of this like any other RTS and try to order several buildings at once. Playing Valhalla Hills the “proper” way is hard. When you’re trying to build up to some of the more complex structures you’re going to need more specialised manufacturers to create the materials and each basic resource gathered can go through several processes before it’s actually useful, meaning that you’re going to need more vikings to get you there (and more vikings means…? That’s it: more food!). But more buildings means that you need more vikings and more vikings means less food to go around. As time passes you’re going to need to grow your population but even the lowest population needs at least a few fishing huts to remain sated and, if the vikings doing the fishing don’t really feel like working, you’re going to need to build a few more to keep the fishies coming. Food is probably one of the most difficult resources to juggle. They love nothing more than lounging about and having a good old chat amongst themselves (providing you’ve encouraged one of them to build a campfire) or more aptly, lounging about and moaning about being hungry something that my vikings seemed to do with increasing regularity as the game progressed. The vikings are, to a grizzly, bearded man and woman, bloody lazy. Since you can’t tell your vikings exactly what you want them to do, they’ll decide amongst themselves who’s going to do what and then hop to it – or not, as the case all too often is. Space and resources are sparse on most levels – you need nice, flat ground to build on, and if it isn’t you’re going to be paying additional costs to pop a little plinth down to support the building. You’re going to need to establish a properly functioning settlement before you can develop it into a bigger town, starting with basic needs – wood, tools, food – and then growing into small-scale industry (farms take their crops to the mill where it is ground into flour and then taken to the bakery to be made into bread) as your population grows. The building portion of the game is pretty great – like in some other RTSs, Funatics have gone for a semi-realistic approach to the functioning of a town with Valhalla Hills. Once you’ve got a military camp, you can even suggest that a few of the vikings would like to be warriors but you still won’t be able to mess around with their free will. You start off each level with a few surly vikings (beamed down from the doors of Valhalla where Odin’s still being a bit petty about how honourable they are) and, over the course of the level, you’ll suggest things for the vikings to do: maybe they’d like to build a tent here, a woodcutter here, maybe they’d like to pop up a quarry over there or a storage area or something. Valhalla Hills is an RTS but, in a similar vein to Populous, The Settlers and Funatic’s previous game, Cultures, with one quite important twist – you never actually get to control any units. In each level of Valhalla Hills you play a sort of cosmic town planner, helping to guide the beleaguered vikings to the portal that marks the end-point of each level, always hoping that this time Asgard will be on the other side of it – though, to pass through the portal, you’ll either have to appease the guards that watch over it with sacrifices or don your horned helmet and prepare to fight! He’s also rather annoyed at the quality of the heroes that have been rocking up in Asgard lately so he’s banished them all back into the mortal world to prove themselves and you’re going with them to show them how to… build and… stuff. So begins Valhalla Hills.Īpparently, Odin isn’t particularly happy that one of his sons (you) prefers to settle down with a trowel and a Vaettir level on an evening rather than getting drunk and fighting people. Odin, Wodan, Wotan, Wotun, Allfather, Anthony Hopkins (pick any one of the hundreds of names he’s known by across the world) – the high god of the Norse pantheon and probably the best known god since the big one – is a dick.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |