Recent reviews by (AEO) OscarQ

Erh Mah Gerd. Just play this game. Such an awesome story. Samurai stuff. Unique and constantly evolving gameplay. Play it!

I was skeptical about the hype to this game. I didn't understand how an early access game that had just come out was selling millions of copies and becoming so popular over night. I decided to see for myself what was going on. Brought a couple friends along. And almost 90 hours later, I'm still always wanting to play this. Valheim has gotta be the best survival game I've played. I've run into almost no bugs. And it's just consistently very fun. Makes for great memories with friends too. If you like the genre, buy in now.

So this game is obviously made by a small, low budget team just starting out and looking to gain experience and expand their resume. So this review will be written accepting that fact. It's like not like I'm critiquing a AAA studio here. With that outta the way, let's get into it.

This is a 2D game purely built around platforming, weapons, and it's enemies. Meaning there is really no story. Just your run of the mill simple objective of beating the big bad guy at the end. Which is disappointing. Because in games like this, a decent story would do alot to help lift it up above many others of it's kind. Some characters. Some backstory. Some speech bubbles. Some proper motivations as to why this quest is being embarked on.

So you're just left with these levels and the gameplay that they bring. The platforming side of it was pretty good at times, but I was often reminded that I'm playing as a stiff and frigid character. There were some cool elements like fans and lava spits. Classic things like spikes. I got impressed when all those things started getting combined to make traps. I got hurt so much lol. It got really hard, especially that damned ice level, but as a result, it did feel accomplishing to beat it all. I particularly thought the worm level was creative and fresh. To navigate, you had to keep changing size, which I enjoyed. The void irritated me though. I hated having to traverse platforming just to get to the next level. And the ice slide series part made me super duper pissed me off. I was stuck at that part for like 10 minutes just trying to get to the next level. The ice level itself was also frustrating because of the character stiffness. A fluidly moving character would of made that level much more enjoyable.

The weapons side of things was a very cool concept. To overcome something in a level and then be able to use it from there on out as a weapon is beautiful way to provide progression to the character. Especially the shrink ray lol. However, I only ever really used the base gun, the banana gun (for health), and the bomb. I found all the others to be kinda useless since I could deal with any situation adequately with the 3 weapons I used during my playthrough. This may change in new game plus, idk, but I definitely didn't feel inclined to use any of the other guns in a first playthrough. Oh and my least favorite was the wind gun. Maybe I wasn't keen enough on how to use it well, but I thought it was absolutely useless.

Now for the enemies. All very, very unique from eachother. But the best way to defeat most of em was from a distance with the base gun. The enemies had the most impact when combined with platforming sequences. That made them very dangerous and I thought that was smart design. The same way different platforming elements kept getting combined with eachother to create new obstacles. The bosses are a different story though. I think they all were pretty cool. Some left a more lasting impression on me than others. Some could you just kinda stand there and spam the base weapon on them. And if you got hurt too much, just banana gun yourself. Others required some strategy and patience. Like the ice boss, lava boss, and the Drakken of course. Drakken was the hardest as he should be! I died like 6 times to him. Thankfully I had farmed over 20 lives in the worm level lol. If I hadn't I would not have beaten this game today. Or tomorrow lol. Drakken was VERY well designed. It's clear alot of effort went into him. And the concept of him taking half your arsenal away was terrifying and cool at the same time. Especially when he was using those very weapons on you. I loved it. Just that boss fight redeemed alot of other shortcomings for me.

Sadly though, there was nothing after that besides new game plus. No cutscene or text. Which adds to my lack of story point. In conclusion, I am very proud of this team sticking around for the long hull and finishing this. A finished and working product is a feat in itself and I commend you guys. Not even the AAA studios released finished products these days. Taking into account all circumstances previously mentioned, I give this a game a score of 7 out of 10. I may try out new game plus to experiment and see if I'm forced to use the other weapons more. If anything significant comes out of it, I'll update my review and also with anything I forgot. Thanks for reading!!

Edit: I forgot to address music and visuals of the game! The music was great! Each level had a unique track that fit very well with it's setting. So 2 thumbs ups for that. The visuals were better than I expected given that it's a 2D game. The character look doesn't leave me with any comments, but the background and look of the levels was not bad. I loved the scale of the last level. It felt large and epic like a castle should, also fitting to it's place as a last level. Sometimes the game was even kinda pleasing to look at.

It's still fun as heck to play all these years after.