
Tents and their larger counterparts increase the limit of available Vikings. The in-game describtions will help you here. Build those close to the other buildings they have to interact with. The building extensions were removed and turned into seperate buildings. You can increase this radius by building roads, making your Vikings reach their destination faster. So, always build a woodcutter near trees, a fishing hut near water, a quarry should be near rocks and so on. If you click on a production building you see the radius of influence of the correspondent worker.

No fish means hungry vikings early in the game. a fishing rod for the fishing hut, which the toolmaker has to make. You need to build an axe for the woodcutter the woodcutter is able to punch trees into logs, but it takes much longer than using an axe. This means, you start an island by building a toolmaker and then a woodcutter. Vikings don't build tools on their own anymore and you got more control over which tools they produce. We've recently introduced the toolmaker to Valhalla Hills. How will they ever manage to build a settlement, confused as they are right now? Your Vikings have fallen from grace and from Valhalla. As the developers continue to fix bugs and improve the game’s performance and interface, being mayor of your own bustling Viking village will only grow more rewarding.Welcome to the world of Valhalla Hills, bold warrior! Meanwhile, what they’ve already put together is plenty endearing, if a little uneven. The developers have plenty of time to sand down the rough spots.
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Valhalla Hills is in Early Access, though, and not due for a full release until next year.
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The tutorial is insufficient, at best, especially if you’re not used to the vagaries of this particular game style (upgrading logs and stones to planks and bricks still needs to be explained, for example, or at least made more obvious in the user interface).The camera controls are limited and clunky, and the game can put a strain on some machines, which is less than ideal, especially since this genre’s audience probably falls outside of the hardcore PC gamer market. The AI still needs work your citizens shouldn’t be starving to death when there’s food available. Nordic Delights, Frustrations and Starvationsįor all its rural Nordic delights, Valhalla Hills is still in desperate need of polish. You’ll find yourself zooming in just to watch arctic hares loping through the snow or wolves stalking the shadowy forests, but the A-frame houses and fishing lodges have their own charms, especially when the sun sets and they’re illuminated by flickering torchlight.

The environments themselves are lovely, as well, both before and after they’ve been settled. Individual Vikings are plump and pleasantly cartoonish, the men sporting a variety of beards, the women all vaguely reminiscent of Doris Roberts, and both sexes decked out in an array of decorative hats, including but in no way limited to the stereotypical horned helmet. The graphic style is perfectly suited to the game’s mellow pace. With a variety of building types to attract eager Viking workers, you can fairly easily establish a nice little town with millers, woodcutters, blacksmiths, fishermen and the like. Valhalla Hills has that pretty much nailed down.


While this adds a nice sense of progress, especially for players unused to the slower pace of German-style village games, the real joy in this type of game is simply setting up a village and letting its inhabitants carry on their daily lives therein. You can also build altars and make offerings to the portal guardians, if you prefer a more peaceful approach, though that’s not very Viking, now, is it? Your individual citizens will persist from one level to the next, building up “Honor” statistics as they go, hopefully accumulating enough to join the father of the gods in Valhalla. To gain access to the next level, you’ll have to open a magic portal and defeat the creatures who spill out of it. Instead of building up a single civilization from hamlet to village to town to empire, Valhalla Hills has you moving from one island to the next, unlocking new buildings and options along the way. Where fellow indie Settlers clone Hearthlands adds complexity, Valhalla Hills actually strips things down somewhat, while also adding a sense of progression via multiple levels. Currently in Early Access, it still has a few rough edges, but the game’s central activity of building little Viking towns is not without its charm. Valhalla Hills is another take on the venerable village-management sim, building on the tradition of the Settlers or Cultures series-developers Funatics actually created the latter series-and attempting to put its own spin on things.
