A Valley Without Wind is a side scrolling action platformer by Arcen Games, supporting both single and multiplayer. The game is currently using a development method that I find to be an interesting one, which gives some specific resul ts regarding the game overall. The game is currently in full release; however each full release is added to over time as the patches have been thoroughly bug tested and suchlike. Players have the option to opt into downloading the ‘beta’ patches. This may seem confusing once you look at the screen as to what version the game is actually in; I was myself somewhat confused at the time. Let me explain: the game is in fact in full release but if the player chooses the option they will get the newest version of the game. Otherwise they will get the newest stable version of the game. This is the reason for there being a secondary updater separate from the steam updater (if you, like I did, purchased the game on steam), that you must activate once the game has already been started up.
Now here is the short version, as after this part of the review I shall be going into a lot of things which, whilst they are quite interesting in my opinion, may not help much with your informed purchase decision. Mostly these are misconceptions, explanations, and notes on how the game does little things.
The game is relatively fun if you like tricky platforming. The controls don’t have much weight behind them, although I believe that was the intention, as the idea was to recreate what an old NES game would have been like if it was made today. The combat is…hectic if you have the difficulty up high enough. The difficulty level is, by default, relatively easy because the developers wanted to make the base level okay for fairly inexperienced gamers. In terms of variety…well honestly just about everything is somewhat lacking right now, at least in the early stages of play. The developers have said that there is content created for making the game playtime as long as possible, so there are plenty of different enemies, locations, etc. to last, however the result is that variety seems sparse at the beginning of the game. Right now I am told there is more content being added to make the earlier parts of the game more interesting and contain more variety.
Gameplay consists of a combination of running through levels beating things up with magic powers, and running through levels beating things up with an objective in mind. Oh, and there are boss towers. Most of the time you will be doing more reacting to the flaming balls of death coming towards you than actually working out where to go next. The minimaps are confusing at first; however once you get used to the structure they are not that bad.
The story is…somewhat confusing. Many time periods have crashed into each other so that you have bits of steampunk next to caves next to rusting sheds. The whole story is odd to say the least, but it doesn’t negatively impact the gameplay at all so nothing is lost there.
The game features procedural generation of levels, the ability to advance a village with NPCs, and continue endlessly. All in all I would say the game is fun if you enjoy that sort of thing, however just due to the amount of early game content I wouldn’t say it was a must buy. What I can say is that it has a lot of potential, especially with the rate at which the devs are throwing out beta updates. Keep an eye on this one, lads.
…Now onto the rest of the info.
Firstly, some of the info on the procedural generation and difficulty settings. The game both has difficulty settings for combat and platforming. How does that work you ask? Well, the monsters' health is scaled up with combat; for one thing, also since the game is multiplayer the monsters' health is scaled to the number of players in the same chunk. This means that is you are in the same map section (screen, essentially) as another player then you fight tougher mobs, but if you are alone then you should be able to handle them as such. The platforming aspect is scaled by the number of platforms generated in the levels.
The graphics are actually 3-d rendered models that have had filters applied to them.
The music is a combination of chip tunes and classical music. This can seem odd at some points, due to the combination, although the pieces seem good when the scene is right. The musical difference is due to the fact that the game’s musical composer specializes in classical music; however the devs wanted to hearken back to the NES days, so there was a combination. The odd placement is due to inevitable problems when combining randomly generated areas with different musical tracks.
One of the last things I asked the devs was an obvious question: “What was running through your minds?!”
They answered thus, “We make games from genres that we love, but never saw the perfect game from that genre”, and from this they wanted to make an “Ode to Metroidvanias”. Well, at the rate at which the game is updating and the potential shown it could certainly be a nice game for anyone who misses those kinds of games from the past.
Review by Josh Merrick
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