Every day was a blessing, every night was a gamble. Night is when the enemies come. Undead throw themselves mindlessly against your defenses, dragons fly right over them. Mysterious travelers promise you rare artifacts — for the right price — and thieves steal supplies in the moonlight. On some nights it just rains. On other nights it rains fire. As the new leader of the Vale it’s up to you to guide your armies to victory, your people to prosperity, and your enemies to an end.
Controlling ValeGuard’s day-night cycle is the main mechanic of the game. During the day you tend to the needs of your town, recruit new troops, and ensure that everything is as ready as can be for whatever challenges arise during the night. The sun only sets when you signal you’re ready to progress, and the night only ends when you’ve faced whatever challenges come your way.
From dragons and bandits to helpful travelers and well-stocked merchants, you never know what will happen when the sun goes down.
ValeGuard is great for people looking for a quick-fix strategy game. Instead of a game where the rules are so convoluted you spend more time reading a strategy guide than playing, ValeGuard is easy to jump right into and learn. You build houses for workers, use workers to harvest resources, use resources to build an army, and use that army to protect your town for a predetermined amount of nights. After you complete that mission it’s on to the next town, and the next town, marching across the kingdom until you get to the ultimate showdown at Ironhold castle.
I’m usually not a fan of long, drawn-out real-time or turn-based strategy games. ValeGuard is a little bit of both, which turned out was just the right amount of both for me.
The day-night cycle functions as a turn. During the day it’s your turn to make your moves and do your chores. During the night it’s the enemy’s turn to move in on you or take the night off. The nighttime scenarios are completely random, you just never know what’s going to happen. When the enemies do show up ValeGuard requires you to move your soldiers around the outskirts of your town (or the streets of your town if the situation sours), and smart players will send in the melee soldiers first, keeping the ranged fighters behind them. Simple strategies, simple game. Simply fine with me.
Aesthetically, ValeGuard could use some more polish. The user-interface looks outdated, you’re better off not zooming in too close on the graphics, and the writing is decent at best. Towards the end of the game when you start amassing large numbers of units and the enemies come in equally large numbers, ValeGuard’s framerate dropped considerably and I’d bet money that it’s due to issue with the game rather than my PC. Beyond the aforementioned concerns and a few gameplay bugs (e.g., I had units become stuck in buildings and some item’s tool tips would not display) ValeGuard exhibited no game-breaking performance issues, just a handful of obvious minor ones. One downside of being a solo developer is little mistakes can slip through and ultimately cheapen the feel of the game. Take, for example, this typo:
It only took me a few hours to beat the game, but because of the random encounters and the ability to choose what towns you leapfrog across the map to, I imagine that players who really enjoyed their first playthrough will find a second playthough worthwhile. I would hesitate to replay the game though, as by the time I reached Ironhold for my final stand many of the night scenarios repeated themselves and by the end I realized that apart from resource management, my success with the scenarios really just came down to sheer luck.
Developing a game on your own is a massive undertaking, and I can’t even imagine the amount of hours that Ryan Drag put into ValeGuard. In the end though, I feel like ValeGuard was a good game, but it’s clear it could have been even better with more than one pair of hands on board.
ValeGuard was reviewed with a retail key provided by the developer.
