ValeGuard presents itself as a neat little city building, resource management, and lite RTS styled game. From videos, and possibly even from watching gameplay from devs, it might even seem quant, balanced, and well thought out. All of these things are entirely wrong, as every level is purely random; from the levels of the land to the placement of the buildings, everything when the player starts is random. This might not seem bad, but it gets worse.
The game is about building the city, so working from a random starting point isn’t terrible—that is until any of the RTS elements come in and areas of the town need to be protected. Those areas normally consist of the inn, which if it falls the level is lost. If the inn is at the center of the town where enemies will destroy everything else first, great, there is time to defeat the bad guys when they attack. If the inn is on the outskirts of the town, the level might as well be restarted.
This is before any of the random events are taken into account. Every night, of which the player normally has to get through 15 of earlier on, there are choices given to engage in an event in different ways. The safest response to this is almost always to simply ignore the event as they have a habit of leading enemies back to the town, and those enemies can randomly be high level wolves that are simply a level reset the moment that they show up. This can happen on the first night, before the player has built any additional units, and has no way of defending themselves aside from a weak main hero.
The problem with the game is that the idea might have been there, at some point, but the devs decided that every single aspect was going to be a dice roll. This might have been have been able to be defended if anything the player did felt like it made a difference in the flow of the game, walls built are easily destroyed, non-hero character do little damage, and peasant housing are destroyed faster than the three little piglets houses in a slight breeze.
ValeGuard is not a good game, it isn’t even fun to play for a little while. It is beyond punishing, and that is at the easiest difficult. The game itself basically makes the player feel bad for lowering the difficulty to simply cope with not being able to pass the first level, and then even after that it is the will of chance itself if it can even happen. Avoid this game, even if it is a free download. It isn’t worth your time, frustration, or mind-space.