Valhalla Hills – Definitive Edition

Settler's style grind. Love it!

Note: This game has one unobtainable achievement!

Valhalla Hills describes itself as a 'classic build up game', in the style of The Settlers. The premise is simple enough: You have an ever expanding Viking civilisation, made of individually named vikings trying to earn enough honour to enter Valhalla, the hall of slain warriors, and live there under the leadership of the god Odin.

In practice, This means playing through a series of randomly generated maps, building up an army through resources which are sourced from the land, Age of Empires style. You'll be chopping down trees, mining ores and hunting wildlife as you place buildings to increase the size of your army and keep them fed and watered. The buildings all work through a traditional chain of command, so you'll need a toolmaker to create axes for your woodcutter, who cuts down trees for your sawmill, who creates planks for your bigger buildings, and so on. Your aim on each map is to scour the map for an exit portal, which you can open when you get near enough, and unleash an army of beasts and monsters you'll need to exterminate before you can pass through the portal and win the map.

Almost every action you take, but especially beating the levels and defeating enemies, earns you honour, which is tracked individually per viking. If a viking dies, he obviously can't earn any more honour during that map, but he'll be resurrected on the following one, retaining any honour he earned. When a viking earns 100,000 honour points he ascends to Valhalla, and in future games will have a little star next to his name and be slightly stronger in battle. The ultimate aim of the game is to ascend 1000 vikings to Valhalla, earning one of the games most time consuming achievements (I'd earned an achievement for playing 24 hours before even ascending my first lot of vikings).

The whole game is played from an isometric viewpoint, but it's a fully 3D world which means you can zoom, rotate and angle the camera as you please, in a similar fashion to games like Tropico 5. Graphically the game ins't exceptional, but has a cute art style similar to the later Settlers games which really works for it. The game does have excellent music though, playing different themes on different maps, although the context sensitive combat music will grate after a while.

Achievements
They're pretty tough. You'll have to play for 168 hours - real time - and ascend 1000 vikings to Valhalla. You'll also need to build 5000 buildings and kill 5000 enemies. It should be noted that the game has one unobtainable achievement: The classic "unlock all other achievements" one, which developers don't seem to understand on the Xbox at all.

Overall
This is exactly my kind of game, and personally I've never let achievement issues get in the way of me enjoying the game. I really, really like Valhalla Hills, a lot: It's one of those games you can play between other games, when you don't have much time to spare, or you need to relax after trying to navigate Dark Souls' Blight Town for the umpteenth time. Each map, depending on the size and difficulty you select, can take you anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour or more to complete, so you can enjoy the game and work towards those long achievements between other things. I play it with my wife, and we take turns in going through the maps, both of us having great fun whilst we do. As always, reviews are subjective, so if it sounds like your kind of experience then you'll enjoy it. If the likes of Age of Empires and The Settlers has never set your world on fire, well, neither will this.

For me though, it has the perfect balance of fun gameplay, length of game customisation and satisfying to work towards achievements that means I enjoy playing it a lot, even after the 200 hours I've already put into it.