“Where did you go?”
“I went left from the house.”
“Hm. I went right.”
“Is there anything interesting over there?”
“Not really…”
“Yeah… same here.”
In Niffelheim, you play as a Viking warrior, trying to fight your way to the end of the game. I try to avoid reading up on a game’s lore for reviews, if I don’t get the story through gameplay, I’m not really interested, and what I came up with in Niffelheim is something something Valhalla, something something warrior spirits.
At the start of the game, you choose your class, Shaman, Viking, Berserker, or Valkyrie (sounds interesting, right? well that’s how they get you), and your starting world (named after four animals, bear and wolf and such, does not really matter which one you pick). You are transported to your humble starting homestead, which is basically a collection of icons, awaiting their upgrades. You have your starting tools, some weapons, low-level food. And you go either to the left or right in a fixed and small 2D world, cut some trees, kill some enemies, collect some ore, return to the base, and upgrade your fortress. There is a staggering amount of craftable working stations which all open up the possibility for more crafting, you have your kitchen, forge, sawmill, alchemy lab, you also have to improve your fortress by building better walls and towers, plus you can keep domesticated animals.
The main threat comes from the siege mechanism, in regular intervals, a horde of skeletons will approach your carefully built fortress, and start carelessly pounding on your walls. So you fight them, repair the wall, and continue what you were doing.
That’s basically the game.
Oh, there is also a mine to explore, you go down, click on the walls, put down some stairs, go deeper.
But that’s really it.
The Good
You know what? Nothing.
The Bad
The game is terribly slow and bulky. Just watch any gameplay video, there will be a Viking built like a cupboard trudging through the screen in extreme slow motion. You jog to the left, click on stuff, then return, repeat with the right, return, and it’s so slow and boring.
Not only is it slow, but it also looks terrible. Like a Flash game from the mid 2000s. The enemies are boring, the model’s skeleton under the texture consists of like three straight lines, their attack is basically raising their hands and then lowering them with a different speed.
The fight system is terrible, you stand in a place and repeatedly press F. There are about two types of monsters in the game, they are repetitive and boring.
The whole game is aimless, pointless, depressing, and nihilistic. Yes, actually very thematic I guess, but this is not why I play games in my free time. I also hated how non-vikingy it is. You can either be pop culture vikingy, or gritty historical reality vikingy, I don’t care which, but do something with this theme if you opted for it. Niffelheim is basically the skeleton of every single crafting survival game ever with some poorly drawn beardy dudes and the speed set to 1/4th.
One other thing I did not understand is that it seemed like the game thought that it’s a harsh survival game, but it’s super easy to get a full meal and not worry about it for a long time. And if a challenge is so easy and so generously timed, it ceases to be a challenge. We have another name for it: annoyance.
The crafting system is overly complicated and yet painfully unimaginative and boring.
I don’t even remember how we stopped playing the game, however, later I read that you need to keep killing the same bosses and grind 20 of some magical gems or something and that’s basically the end – so I’m glad that we made the right decision after minimal waste of time.
The Co-Op
No, there is hardly any co-operation in the game, you are randomly derping on the same map, and you occasionally see each other and use the shared facilities like kitchen and stuff. Like some roommates who secretly loathe each other but have to use the kitchen appliances after the other.
By the way, I think co-op crafting games just don’t work. I hope that one day I will be proven wrong.
Update: I was proven wrong on that last bit, see recommendations.
The Recommendation
Nope, not recommended. As of writing this review, this is going to be our first triple-terrible video game.
If you want a co-op survival crafting experience in a gritty world that is actually harsh and unforgiving, try Don’t Starve Together. If it’s the 2D side-scrolling hack and slash that you were hoping for in this game, Salt and Sanctuary won’t disappoint.
Update: And if you want a good co-op crafting game, check out The Forest.
Info
| Release Year | 2018 |
| Genre | Crafting |
| Difficulty | Very Easy |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | who knows, for us it took 1.5 hours to get bored with it |
Rating
| Overall | Terrible |
| Story | Terrible |
| Co-Operation | Terrible |