Recent reviews by Grandy

If you'd asked me a decade ago I probably would've given the game a borderline positive review.
It was addictive, and when at war it was both the best and worst of times - being woken up in the early hours by faction members warning of being attacked etc, nights on teamspeak organising armies and plans for where to attack and when. War was hell, but you went through it with friends - so looking back I see that while not the best use of my time, I got some enjoyment out of it.

Today, some parts of this exist, but the game has simultaneously completely changed and not changed at all. Many core pieces remain the same - the game has the same client and barely any new features/QoL this entire time. It has been on development autopilot for pretty much the entire decade. Faction warfare, the gameplay loop, diplomacy are mostly similar.

However, the main differences are:

- Third party tools and exploits are commonplace, against TOS, but not acted upon. Two main flavours of this - clientside bots and external data gathering. The former that can protect your town without you being there, can detect types of armies coming at you, can autopilot many of the game's functions to give you an advantage; there's even a private server you can practise things in. The latter includes a website which can tell you the online/activity patterns of other players, and a Discord bot which can alert you if you're being attacked instantly.

Some of this might be somewhat okay if it was available for free to everyone, but instead it is both paid AND elitist. It is not easy to get access, however you won't see wars without people using them. Houses will pay the creators of these apps to give access to these tool(s) for their house, but that's only if there's a pre-existing relationship in place. I've heard of instances where houses have paid big sums to get access to the app revoked for another person/group. It's mad. Wars are players using bots vs players using bots. Not using a bot? Good luck.

- Faith point production. To protect your village from attack requires faith points, and originally you could only slowly accrue faith points via production and you could not "buy" anything that gave you them. Firefly introduced "wheel spins" (that gave a % chance) and quest rewards for faith points. This meant that people with deep pockets could rapidly gain a ton of faith through their use of their money as they advance faster through the ranks - made worse by:

- Card point purchasing. There are backdoor ways for people to cheaply purchase vast amounts of the card-purchasing points in the game. Nothing is done about it. Many still have _deep_ card point pools that won't run out any time soon.

- Alt accounts are rife and also not acted upon consistently.

Avoid the game like it is the plague.

A pretty cosy tower defence with macro/economy elements.

I've played a lot of They are Billions, and a few different tower defence games over the years, and it's somewhere between the two. Decision making on how to spend your gold, with waves of enemies in between. Buildings are only placeable on pre-defined nodes and depend on the level of your main control centre; most things are upgradeable, sometimes with a choice of perks. Enough choice to make it interesting, but it has been designed to be semi limited.

Your character is a kind of special hero, which with the perk progression can become your main line of defence if you want it to. Some weapon/perk combos seem a lot more powerful than others, so perhaps still some balancing to be done, but overall pretty decent.

The game includes a variety of +% difficulty options that you can choose to toggle on for the mission you're entering, so you can make it as difficult as you'd like.

Overall, pretty fun wee game. I can imagine myself coming back to re-play missions with added difficulty/different perk combinations. Worth picking up.

Made with such a level of artistry, both in terms of the character behind the "simple" visual style which sucks you in, and in terms of the pacing of how the game reveals itself and the story. They dot in something funny and unique at common enough intervals to keep things interesting while not complicating the gameplay loop too much along the way.

I'm very glad I gave this a try - it's not normally something I'd be interested in.
Completed it in ~26 hrs.

NEED SOME MUSCLE?!

Joins a very small list of great early access titles worth buying day 0.
It's fast, satisfying, sometimes frustrating (though almost always your fault in some way).

Devs seem really receptive and have been very careful preparing the game for release over many years of iterative playtests to make sure things would run well - and it definitely paid off.

You press WASD until you die; occasionally choosing an item from a list or opening a random upgrade box.

That's it; that's the game.

You also get different characters (starting bonus/item), and power-ups (slight stat alterations), but the core is just a 30-minute bullet hell one-life loop. Requires some tactical planning but not enough to make you feel at all stressed - is just a really nice, light game.

KILLED IN ACTION.
Press [Space] to redeploy.

An early access game worth playing!

Reminds me of the whole "what if a game combined the open-world base-building of Minecraft and the adventure/progression of Terraria" question that entered the minds of every person who ever played those games.

Valheim simply gets a lot of things right, even this early on. It's low-poly, but immersion into the world with its lighting/weather/music is just spot on. Fights feel rewarding, some part Dark Souls-esque in nature, and the grind of resource collection and upgrading/progression seems to strike the right balance. You don't always feels safe, nor also always feel in danger, which rather adds to the atmosphere. Having it be based in Viking mythology was a bit of a genius move for theme/content/lore too tbh.

There are a couple of issues - such as the pathing of enemies (skeletons take a particular dislike of door frames for example), and player position sync on servers can sometimes be a bit out of wack... but that's about all the negatives I can think of right now. Small things which I can imagine are on their list to fix.

As of this review, I'm gunning for the second boss (which I probably could've done much earlier), and viewing other players' content I can imagine the late-game once all bosses completed could get rather stale, but from what I hear, there's plans to add more to do at various stages of the game, so hopefully that will become less of an issue long-term as the game heads towards full release and beyond.

My only warning about Valheim would be that you can spend "half an hour" in-game, and it actually be anywhere from 1-3 hours later.

I would definitely recommend this game and community/developer to anyone.

Gameplay is fast and fun, voxels providing a dynamic environment and infinite possibilities for flanks and setups. Also has a solid competitive side which we'll get to see in the upcoming tournaments. It's also free :)

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Saying this as of 4 days after release - sure, there have been issues for some users - issues with the anti-cheat integration and even a major issue due to a Windows update that changed how things worked. Spawncamping was happening in some games, and some people had complaints about recoil etc.

To be frank, this was bound to happen to some degree - the alphas had a very limited population size in comparison to the wider population now getting access to the game, and because of how long we were in alpha, game balance was skewed towards the long time players.

What should hopefully speak volumes however, is the massive amount of updates that have come out since releasing 4 days ago. A big patch each and every day - Vercidium has fixed many win7, framerate/stuttering, matchmaking and EAC issues (even somehow smoothing out my PC's performance after 3 years of playing!?), have altered the spawn areas on all maps and is continuing to adjust them to help avoid spawntraps. Recoil was lessened and he plans to revisit game balance shortly.

Vercidium, myself and the team have been here all day every day answering questions, gathering logs and being there as a point of contact so that we can fix your issues. All I'd ask is to allow us the opportunity to address your issues before you leave a review - we want everyone to have a great and smooth experience; if we can help you, maybe it will help others too.

So if having issues or just wanting to voice your feedback, do visit the Steam discussion board or talk to us on Discord (https://discord.gg/sectors) or report issues (with log files) on our forum (https://forum.sectorsedge.com/c/bug-reporting/5) - we are here and listening!

Gotta be about a year or two since I binged a game this hard, pretty addictive.
Love the aesthetic/sound/feel to the whole thing - they've made it cute while also monsterous/dark/gritty.

I could start trying to make comparisons to other voxel/terrain destruction games, but honestly it doesn't do it justice.

If you can grab a few mates to pick it up at the same time - especially spicy. Solo'ing is good with the drone companion, duos work (best with scout/engie) but getting a fuill 4-man is peak.