A Valley Without Wind 2 Reviews

- Eye-bleedingly bad art direction where everything looks like 2D paper cutouts, and only right and 45 degree angle platforms exist - Atrocious "level design" (non-existent would be a better word for it) - Uninspired platforming gameplay - Technicolor text strewn everywhere - Achievements popping up every few seconds, mostly for things that can't be properly labeled achievements (by the 3 hour mark, I had unlocked nearly half of the game's 200 achievements) - Hodge-podge of random ideas that doesn't come together into a cohesive whole Ok, the positives: + Quite relaxing (albeit somewhat melancholy) soundtrack that may be the overall highpoint of the game, in terms of quality + Overworld design has better overall art direction than the platforming segments + Interesting dystopic story and environment (unfortunately the writing quality is a bit lacking)

Much more polished and streamlined in terms of design and art than the first installment of the series, this game has a real (although basic) story arc and character progression system based on feats and perks. The combat is vastly more tactical than in the original as well. Simply bursting head first into the landscape on Storm Dash will only result in certain and immediate death. The overworld strategy layer and side-scrolling action integrate well with each other and manipulating one vs the other (to an extend) is a lot of fun. If you like tactical side-scrolling action integrated with a basic but unique strategy layer guiding where to engage next, this game is for you! Recommended.

Very weird game. Got it for 3$ (sales <3) so I can finally play it and test it out myself. It has more cons than pros for me, and I also give it a negative review as in "I don't recommend it to almost anyone", but [b]unlike[/b] most other games nowadays, it did make me enjoy or even hooked for a while, so I kinda feel bad for reviewing this negatively, but there are too many flaws to ignore. Pros: [list] [*][b]Exclusively Skillshot-based combat[/b] Your abilities are also very bizzare abilities (imagine shooting at a straight line) [spoiler]You must enable the mouse targetting at settings, because it is not default... And I see it as mandatory to play this. I legit cannot imagine anyone enjoying playing this without mouse since you can shoot only in 3 directions and everything is so mobile and fast[/spoiler] [*][b]A dazzling amount of areas/levels[/b] [*][b]Turn-Based Strategy done [u]right[/u].[/b] The Strategic layer is the thing that sets it apart. It is a metroidvania but with a strategy map where you command your [strike]minions[/strike]recruits. So, you explore and expand the map by going to places yourself, and your recruits do everything else. Resource management exists (food as an upkeep for recruits/scrap to build buildings/morale for effectiveness of recruits) and by building and assigning each one to a tile/building, you improve these. However, this is not some "pull someone into a farm to make food".... There is combat too. Nothing fancy (which is good, being complex isn't good), but monsters spawn around certain locations, and you must defend them with your recruits. Eventually (when early-game ends), big bad boss spawns, and chases to kill everyone. That means, if you built everything onto a few adjacent tiles, then you are about to lose, since the big bad boss is invulnerable and never dies. It prevents camping/turtling. So, you expand on the explored area of yours, with those recruits building stuff left and right, while the boss perma-kills them. This makes the strategic map dynamic with the monsters too, instead of building and snowballing the game with boredom. So, the biggest pro in this game, and what gets me playing is that it got right what matters: "[b][u]Just One More Turn[/u][/b]". You see where you want to explore/tiles to unlock for your recruits, you get in, you kill everything, then onto the world map, you build stuff and move your recruits appropriately. Repeat. Super satisfying gameplay loop not gonna lie, and its short on top of that <3 [/list] Neutral: [list] [*][b]The Artstyle[/b] There are 3~5 different artstyles from what I noticed in the game, and it shows. However, I find it refreshing to see tbh, however, sometimes the artstyle clashes too harshly. So, most people will dislike it for sure, since it is not consistent and high-quality, however I like it, hence the neutral category. [*][b]The Music[/b] The main theme is 100% [b]HYPE[/b], legit feels like you are about to play an incredible game you will never forget. But aside of that, the rest of the music is ambience. But its not bad, since it sets the mood right most of the times. Hence the neutral here, because you may dislike ambience music (ofc, you can turn it off and blast your playlist in the background) [*][b]The Multiplayer[/b] Haven't played it, can't judge. But I do appreciate that the developers support full multiplayer in this game, I will definitely get into this if I find replayability to the game, aka I finish it and want to replay it. [*][b]Procedurally Generated World[/b] You may not like this, because it is not hand-crafted. Though, I didn't notice, until I read it on the store page, so that means they must have done a good job with this. Adds a lot of replayability, for those who want to replay it. [/list] Cons: [list] [*][b]The Camera[/b] Perhaps the worse camera in any 2D game. Ever gotten damaged by off-screen enemies? Yeah, happens all the time. It never zooms in or out, it just moves a little to the left or right depending on your movement. So even if it moved properly, the zoom is really really bad, its un-needed sometimes because this is a skillshot game, and I cannot see how far away my enemies are... [*][b]The Movement[/b] You feel like you play a crippled mario. You move left and right, with an meh speed, and you can jump. That's all there is to it. No high jumping, no wall-jumping, no momentum feel, no high speeds ever. The platforming legit feels worse than the original mario... [*][b]The Balancing[/b] Not gonna mention the enemies, since I did dropped difficulty a lot because I hate meat-sponges (20 seconds of hitting a fodder enemy to kill it smh wtf) The balancing, means the player class' progression. There are 5 tiers of classes in-game. That's a lot, since at least 5 classes per tier. However, I am at tier 2, and there is a certain tier 1 class, that is extremely better, than any tier 2 class... That is sad. Because when I mean tiers, I don't mean levels. 5 tiers is the endgame, and tier 2 is early to midgame... [*][b]The Sound Effects[/b] Not horrible by any means, but just meh. Incredly forgettable/generic and unsatisfying. But at least they deliver the proper sound cue or effect, and I'm glad they at least exist in this kind of game. [*][b]The Animations[/b] Horrible, bad bad bad. The enemies' is even worse, if they even have one aside of walking/running lmao. But the player's is really bad tbh. Kinda sad, but whatever, it's not a deal-breaker to me at all, since I barely see my character when im trying to focus on enemies and skillshots. [*][b]The Bossfights[/b] At least they are not boring lel. Like, they dont have invulnerable phases, where you have to wait a million years for them to be vulnerable again. No bs moves either. They just walk on a platform shooting shit at you, while fodder are trying to get you. Pretty easy and predictable tbh. Then when they lose X of their life, they teleport deeper into the dungeon. The fighting area has Y depth, unlike some tunnel-levels in the game, and the enemies attack you a lot. But it just sucks, because the bosses are weak af with predictable/slow projectiles and the monsters arent infinite, so you can just slowly kill the enemies, then focus on the boss, which is an absolute weakling everytime. And ofc, every bossfight is essentially the same, but like I said, at least its not boring because you can go at your own pace guns blazing, or turtling to victory safely. And it also refreshes the pace since its a different kind of gameplay than killing enemies and advancing in a level, or doing strategy map stuff. [*][b]The Polishing[/b] It really feels like there is a lot of content in this game, and a lot of effort was spent making it. But the game lacks polish for sure. A lot is needed. [/list] If you still want to play the game after having read all of this, [b]ENABLE THE MOUSE SETTINGS[/b], because otherwise, you will be playing with some botched d-pad control settings, where every enemy is super mobile, and you can only shoot 0/45/90 degrees... I legit cannot believe the default control settings are keyboard-exclusive... Eight-Way aiming in 2019... Every enemy that doesnt move in a straight line is highly mobile, so it is impossible to hit without mouse! If I had to take a guess, you will like this, only if you are looking to play a unique platformer/metroidvania, since no other platformer or metroidvania game, has incorporated proper/fun strategic elements like this. But if you do, with all the replayability value onto this game(multiplayer + so many different classes + procedurally generated world that is actually good), you are bound to spend a lot of time with it (20 hours+) Even if you dont plan on replaying the game (like me as of now), having experienced all the flaws above as you have seen, I still like this game, and enjoyed my time with it thus far, but I legit wouldn't recommend it to almost anyone.

I gave this game as many chances as I could- 26 hours in, and I'm 100% confident I can say this is not worth playing, even if you loved the first one. Let's skip all the reasons I straight subjectively dislike it, and get right to the bugs. When the music ends and loops, there is a 2 - 5 second delay, guaranteed, everytime. I'm not keen on technical jargin, but basically, it skips that many frames. Or, in other words, it fills in what it thinks you were doing in that amount of time. If you were in a frantic fight and slightly holding right, have fun dying in a pit of lava. This actually happened to me twice! Other times it ran me into enemies and also died. There was another. Whatever, I forgot. It sucks that the adviser doesn't let you know where the citadels are to be able to infiltrate the main dungeon. This goes for any tile that it doesn't outright tell you where it is. So many times I've been one tile away from a space I needed but the game's coloring of unpurified tiles is so dark I had no idea I'd been right next to it. I would explain what purifying tiles means, but really, truly, it's not worth it. Hard pass on this one. The first game is miles better. I tried.

It seems like a lot of effort went into it, but it's got a lot of things that just make it not very fun. There's platforming and a strategic map section, and while the platforming is okay, the strategic map has you under constant pressure to deal with threats and keep a bunch of numbers up and it's not always clear what's going on. For someone who likes quick, engaging platformers, the strategy elemtn will probably just be stressful and overwhelming, as it was for me. If you like strategy games, you'll probably think the platforming is unpleasant. The eight way aiming makes it hard to feel like you have a satisfying level of control over your character and leads to combat that is more frustrating than it is pleasantly challenging.

Still as janky as the first one. You can screw yourself in the strategy section pretty easily. He added mouse aiming but it doesn't add much. Multiplayer isn't great but with coordination you can really make something happen. Its not pretty at all, but no true roguelike is. I personally find it fun to just endlessly plow through areas so I was not disappointed at all.

Question the graphical choices all you want. This game is the ActRaiser successor I never realized I wanted until I played. It's a strategy board game tightly integrated with run and gun action. The regular threats to my units and structures provided by Demonaica and summoned monsters along the way kept me alert. You need those units and those units need at least some of those structures. While I won on the default settings, know that this is a game that allows you to lose after hours and hours of investment. The duration might be the only real gripe I have. I could be biased by my analysis paralysis and the time it took to learn my first game. However, the promise of another procedurally generated map to conquer loses some of its charm for me when it takes double digit hours to finish. I realize that's probably not uncommon for the strategy genre, but I have to too many games in my Steam library to bother. As a bonus, the game also comes with the prequel. Some may enjoy the more freeform exploration, but the branching pathways contain a lot of empty, useless space. It's big for the sake of being big. I much prefer the sequel's selection of more linear playfields. The prequel also allows players to gather much more loot and micromanage their inventory. Though I may whine when my equipment breaks, I much prefer the sequel's limit of a single, temporary piece of loot that disappears when replaced. With the collection of perks, feats and mage classes tied so closely to one's progress, there's enough to gather and worry about as it is. In short, the sequel cuts out a lot of the cruft and is a better game for it. Finally, forum complaints can largely be ignored. Mouse control has been added. It allegedly makes the game too easy at the moment so I'd suggest gamepad or keyboard controls for now. Either way, it shows that Arcen listens. I'd personally also like to see more animation detail and a final sendoff when the game ends. However, it's worth playing as it is.

Listen. I love this game. It's one of a kind. If you like metroidvania type games you should definitely check it out especially when it's only 2.99 right now on sale. What makes it so unique compared to other games of the kind is that every level is a tile on the turn based strategy game portion, and what level you will want to do is going to be decided by what you need to be happening strategically. What makes the game such a fun challenge is that each tile has a difficulty percentage that can vary widely depending on different factors including what is happening in the strategy portion. So, you might really need to open up a section of a map that's blocked by a tile with %500 difficulty level, but have fun with those crazy fast enemies and projectiles that knock off a third of your health, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do. Or, what if you can't make it through? Time to rethink your strategy, work on earning enough coins to hire mercenaries to open it up for you, tweak your character to go for speed over health, or or whatever else you can think of. The world has it's own rules and mysteries and a lot of the fun is these things slowly becoming apparent to you as you play. What I love about the game is all the variety in the side scrolling action and it's effect in making your strategy come together to win the game. I think personally this game is tied with Red Faction Guerilla for most underrated, but this probably even more for all the hate it gets from people that can't look past its subpar graphics to see the amazing gameplay and feeling of being in a coherent world with its own inherent logic all coming together in a challenging and satisfying experience. Just like other Arcen games there are lots of difficulty settings, I suggest you crank it up a bit.

Hoo boy. The original [i]A Valley Without Wind[/i] struck me as about the quality of a particularly impressive bit of shareware in the late 90s: horribly dated by modern standards and without 1980s retro charm (though maybe that just means it came a decade early), but at the very least technically competent. Animations were smooth (though obviously based on some simple figure rendering program like Poser), the control scheme worked, the story didn't make much sense but a lot of 90s shareware didn't so I could at least poke around with it and be vaguely amused. You will note that I only have 19 minutes on record with [i]A Valley Without Wind 2[/i]. I'm going to hold off on explaining why for just a moment. This sequel--if it can really be called that, since the whole [i]AVWW[/i] "broken reality" thing never made much narrative sense to begin with, and apparently intentionally so--has you running a rebellion against a big bad. Unlike the original [i]AVWW[/i], where you had followers who you would make go away for so many minutes to go gather firewood or whatever while you ran around the infinitely side-scrolling (well, infinitely transitioning, at least) map, this actually has a strategic map for you to tell your followers to go to places and do things and fight baddies. It's a nice touch, adding some level of strategic force movement rather than simply "Bob has a 57% chance of getting a carrot with a 99% risk of dying because Bob is a loser." Well, I lie. It would've been a nice touch. If it worked. If anything worked. If [i]AVWW[/i] has the quality of decent 90s shareware, [i]AVWW2[/i] has the quality of [b]bad[/b] 90s shareware, the kind that I have spent a good decade and a half trying to forget that I grew up on. The characters have gone from smoothly-animated pre-rendered 3D geometry sprites to poorly MS Paint'd cartoons that move as though they're suffing grand mal seizures. In [i]AVWW[/i], everything was made of pre-rendered sprites so it all fit together visually. Random elements in [i]AVWW2[/i] are pre-rendered, some are drawn, others are painted, and they're all mashed together in incoherent tilesets so it's actually extremely distracting. The control system went from a simple but effective "keyboard to move, mouse to aim" system in [i]AVWW[/i] to a clunky and incoherent keyboard-only system. For a comparative example, let's say you want to shoot your magical ball-o'-death at some critter at an angle: [i]AVWW[/i], point and click. [i]AVWW2[/i], hold the right and up and fire keys at the same time and pray to whatever gods you have that you timed that perfect 45° angle shot just right because 45° angles are all you're going to be doing and also if you don't do the fire button at the right time then you're just going to jerkily leap your character up and into the target in a valiant but utterly stupid attempt to smash the enemy with her face. That's how [i]Archon[/i] worked back in the late 80s. It's as though the [i]AVWW2[/i] was coded for a particularly archaic D-pad setup. Everything about it is completely retrograde from the original. It's completely unforgivable, since these people were able to make something competent, if not particularly impressive before. However, it's also unimaginably hilarious. It is so bad you just have to stop and laugh at everything. And then just stop, since there's absolutely no point to go on any further with it. There's certainly no point in actually spending money on the experience.

There's some interesting ideas here, and it's a multiplayer game in the strictest sense of the word, but at the end of the day when you cross genres you want to blend them rather than keep them in their own awkward boxes. This game has an art style that will be off-putting to many, but I found it charming in an odd way. The different powers are interesting, but could be a little more imaginative and balance between them is basically non-existant. For the most part, the powers don't make good use of the movement- and neither do the randomly generated maps that generally end up being narrow tunnels to fall down and strange ceilings. The boss fights are slightly better by being a little more open, but overall it's very static and repetitive. The game has a metric ton of good ideas, but the implementation and integration is so poor that everything steps on each other's toes. In addition the game uses strange terminology and despite explaning itself is still pretty difficult to puzzle out. Figuring it out is kind of fun, but once you unlock the puzzle you realize that it's a lot simpler than it lets on in a bad way and it's more about getting lucky early on with a co-operative starting area than anything else. Speaking of Co-op, it is barely functional and requires a great deal of patience. Still, it's nice to have the option to be able to suffer together. To it's credit, I can't say I didn't have any fun, but bad platforming, dissonant storyline, confusing mechanics and characters and luck-based play (a decent beginning can trivialize the hardest difficulty but a bad one makes all but the easiest one impossible) as well as terrible implementation of platforming means I'm not going to be missing it.