“Not the most exciting work, but it keeps me busy.” This was a strange statement from the man who, just seconds ago, told me about our new life as slaves. “Ah shit, here we go again,” my character replies, before looking for a pickaxe to complete her forcibly assigned labor and avoid hanging from a rope. This interaction was the very first one in Valorborn, and one that set the tone for the rest of the game.
Valorborn is a fantasy adventure RPG with a heavy emphasis on crafting and building. To put it simply, it’s a medieval version of the game Kenshi, allowing players to freely explore a vast open world populated by NPCs and small towns where you can create your own party, build your own towns, and essentially take part in a simulated world economy where your colony’s own workers can craft every item.
Given that the title is in Early Access, this promising concept is far from seeing its full potential, and I would definitely say that there’s a lot of work to be done before I would recommend the game to players. Even those who may be interested in checking out the game early and supporting its development may find it better to wait a few months for patches and updates. This isn’t to say that the game is terrible or has no potential, but simply that I found it to be in a state that may sour your opinion on the game more than it sells you on the experience.
In the original draft of this review, I really wanted to focus more on the game’s writing. It’s one of the first issues you’ll notice if you play the tutorial, and I found it particularly distracting. However, because there are more pressing issues to discuss and the writing is more of a subjective thing in a game like this, I’ll simply say that the dialogue and pacing in the few narrative events in Valorborn (particularly the tutorial) are very awkward, have a confusing tone and sentence structures, and suffer from inconsistent pacing. I would like to see the tutorial area redone entirely before the game launches.
Getting into the actual game, it’s easy to forget about those issues, though, as you delve into a proven formula that made Kenshi so successful. The ability to freely explore the world, gather materials, and craft anything from a small camp to a whole city is really fun, and I look forward to seeing how the game expands on this formula as it develops.
It’s hard, however, to fully engage with the mechanics given the number of distracting issues currently present in the Early Access build of Valorborn.
The very first thing you’re going to notice is how terrible the frame rate becomes once you leave the tutorial island. In sparsely populated areas, I would only reach 32 FPS, and in cities, it could drop as low as two to five frames. This is undoubtedly due to the notoriously unstable Unreal Engine; as with other UE titles, players will likely face equal, if not greater, performance issues. Widespread optimization patches and playtests are definitely needed before I can really recommend the game, even to players who want to play in Early Access.
These same performance issues also contribute to the game’s incredibly long load times. Transitioning between scenes can take upwards of a minute or two on better hardware, and it’s definitely something that can take you out of the immersion.
While a core part of the game, the crafting system is a bit clunky and awkward, and could be improved. It took me a minute to learn quite how everything is meant to work, particularly at workbenches: items must be collected by your party, inserted into the workbench, queued up for crafting, and then the worker must operate the machinery for the crafting duration to produce the item. It’s not the worst system in the world, and I like its immersive nature and how it demands real-time commitments from your party, but there are probably better ways to accomplish this.
As far as I can tell, there is also no way to cancel a project once it has started crafting. This means that if you accidentally start the wrong project, as I did, there is no way to stop it, and you just waste resources.
The awkward UI doesn’t help, either. Strange color choices make the selectable boxes in certain parts of the UI hard to see. Sometimes, clicking on a task so that you can trigger work to start cancels the work instead. I also couldn’t figure out any way to fast-move items between inventories or rotate them, the latter being a super important feature in a grid-style inventory system.
Alongside these glaring issues are a few minor bugs here and there that contribute to the game’s overall unfinished feel. One such example was a tutorial mission that told me to build a skinning knife at my workbench to harvest deer carcasses. Not only was the skinning knife actually called a “simple dagger,” but it was crafted in a totally different location than the tutorial told me it was. You might be able to imagine why inconsistencies like this could make the game frustrating for a new player to learn.
Despite all of my criticisms, I’m actually very confident that Valorborn could one day be an amazing game, one that rivals Kenshi in a critically underutilized genre. The inherent gameplay loop is super fun and can make you ignore smaller issues like less-than-perfect UI, writing, or more generic-looking assets. However, the more glaring issues in this review definitely need to be addressed, and I would advise would-be buyers to give the game a little time to develop before jumping in, as the current experience might sour your opinion of the game before it has the chance to really shine.
Pros:
- An inherently fun sandbox gameplay loop in a critically underrepresented genre
Cons:
- Numerous bugs and small problems in the current EA build
- Terrible frame rate and optimization
- A lack of overall content in the current build of the game
- Bad, hard-to-navigate UI that’s missing stable QoL features
- A somewhat awkward crafting system that could use improvement
Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC Early Access Review of Valorborn. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page!
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