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Cloudheim is a brand-new game from Noodle Cat Games. They’re a new studio hoping to make a name for themselves by creating something a little different from the usual kind of games seen on the market.
A physics-based combat system and a story-focused co-op RPG world to explore are what truly define Cloudheim as a game. Whether you’re bouncing around the map looking for treasure or delving into dungeons to plunder their loot, there’s more than enough to do.
When I first picked up Cloudheim, I thought I knew what I was getting into, but boy, was I wrong. This game has a lot going on, and it seems like the developers aren’t even to done yet.
The real question with Cloudheim isn’t a matter of whether the game is in the perfect place right now. It’s whether the game can get to where it’s going and nail the landing.
What is Cloudheim?
This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer, given that it should be a physics-based co-op RPG. While that is the game’s main characteristic, there is another part, base building.
In Cloudheim, you’ll move from island to island, completing quests and collecting items as you attempt to recruit the god associated with that island to your team. Your ultimate goal is to fix the world that’s been shattered by Ragnarok, and the only hope you have is recruiting the gods to your side.
You have four classes that you can use, with no limit, so you can use all the classes and their weapons with no problems. From there, it’s a pretty standard RPG: level, get loot, and eventually take on a boss. Once you’ve decided you have enough or finished getting everything you needed to, you can head back to your base camp, on the back of a huge flying turtle.
Here you’ll build your base and give your Bolins, a sort of NPC that provides bonuses and gathers some resources, their jobs. You’ll need to smelt ore and use it to craft different kinds of weapons, each one unique to a class. You’ll also be able to sell any unwanted items you want at a shop where NPCs can come and purchase your wares.
That’s pretty much everything there is. There are some more specifics that I’ll get into later, but now that you’ve got an understanding, there’s still one important piece. This is an early access game, so the game could look totally different in just a few months.
The Story So Far
In the version I was able to get my hands on and play, it seems like the story stops at the second island, but this will change in the release version. That said, there’s still a long way for the story to go before it’s even to finished, it seems.
If you’re hoping for an incredible Nordic epic that gives you a real sense of being of immense power and destiny, I hate to say it, but you won’t really fall in love with the story, at least not yet. It’s more like window dressing to explore the colorful and interesting world presented in Cloudheim.
There doesn’t seem to be much of any voice acting outside the tutorial. More than that, there are very few cutscenes beyond the introductory ones. You also don’t have many NPCs to interact with beyond a few conversations.
Your character’s deeds are the main focus of the story, but each island has a main quest giver who will give you some lore along with the quests. There isn’t much more there, as the NPCs really exist to push you along to the next quest or next world. Anyone else you meet can offer up some information and lore, but they won’t do much else.
You’ll recruit the gods and bring them to your base, where they’ll find a spot to hang out. After that, the NPCs of the island become uninteresting, so you should move on to the next island unless you can’t, because you need more World Stars.
The Rollercoaster of Progression
Progression in Cloudheim feels both good and bad. On the one hand, you have your player level and your class level. On the other hand, you have your base level and your World Stars. These World Stars are what enable you to unlock other islands.
Let’s start with player level and class levels. For your player level, it’ll go up as you do things like complete quests or defeat monsters. Your class level only goes up when you use a weapon or ability from that class, but you can mix and match these at your discretion. Your player level raises your natural stats, while your class level raises specific stats and unlocks new abilities for that class.
There’s another layer of progression on top of this as well, weapon progression. Weapons can level up and grow stronger, but they can also be enhanced by finding upgrades while exploring. It isn’t a bad idea on the surface, but it also means that new weapons aren’t wildly important. You don’t need to hunt down stronger weapons because your weapons are always getting stronger up to a certain point.
As you do more around the maps, you’ll unlock World Stars. These can spawn randomly in some chests, but are also rewards for completing puzzles, beating bosses, or finishing dungeons. While not difficult to come across, they also become a bit of a pain to collect if you aren’t doing everything you come across on the island.
With these systems set in place, it sort of turns the game into a grind where you’re more or less looking for World Stars, so you can move on to the next island. It’s not a huge deal, but having other islands being gated off by World Stars rather than player level makes your player level feel a bit irrelevant in comparison.
They do give you a good reason to explore the world, but I found myself a bit naturally inclined to explore. The game encourages and rewards exploration, which is great, but I did find myself struggling with finding World Stars when I just wanted to move on to the next island.
It's A Wonderful World
The world itself is actually a lot of fun to simply run around in. The movement is fluid, and you can get a lot of verticality by abusing any small edges you can manage to fit on. It makes moving about the island an interesting game of «can I just climb this mountain?» and the answer is almost always yes.
Not only is exploring fun, but the level design of the islands often puts you in the path of treasure and puzzles. You’ll basically move about from one to the next with the occasional detour for whatever shiny object you see in the distance. But more than that, almost every square inch of the islands are filled in.
They aren’t so big that you’ll spend all your time running around, but they are big enough that you can utilize the mechanics to their fullest. Jumping around and dashing through the air, especially with the blink evade, is very satisfying as you try to see how high you can get or how far you can make yourself go.
With how much fun it can be just exploring the map and wiping out hordes of enemies, it feels odd that there’s a part of the game that seems to derail the entire process. Since you have to return to your base on the turtle and do the base building, you end up totally taking yourself out of exploration to do that instead.
Building for Bolins
If you think you’ll be building the actual buildings that you enter, you’re wrong, as everything in the game is basically fun-sized for your Bolin buddies. They actually run the whole shindig while you just go out and do the hard work of gathering things up. The base is where you’ll cleanse, smelt, and craft different items to help you on your quest.
All the buildings are fairly small, which, if you’re a big base builder, means you’ll have a great time setting them up in whatever fashion you like. Though keep in mind you’ll have to carry all materials you collect to their respective spots and cleanse or smelt them yourself. This doesn’t sound too bad until you realize you can only carry four different items at a time, and most have limited stacks.
If you go out on a journey for more than half an hour and come back, you’re going to be there for a while as you walk back and forth, moving items from one building to the next to finally get what you’re after. I spent more than a half an hour going through everything I’d gathered in an hour and a half session on one island.
It consisted of me moving from my chest with stacks upon stacks of items to my cleansing pool, then the smelter, then whichever building I needed next. It doesn’t seem like anything in your chest has max stacks, but even if it did, you have infinite chest space. After realizing that, I mostly abandoned my base as it wasn’t doing much for me.
This can be easily rectified at some point down the line, but for now, it is definitely a major part of the game that ends up killing your momentum whenever you come back to base and remember what horrors await you.
A Merchant's Dream
Just like the average isekai protagonist, you have the option of selling your hard-earned loot for cold, hard cash. You can use that money to buy upgrades like more health, accessories, and stats. The only problem is that there’s less negotiating and more inventory management.
I’m not going to lie, but this seemed a little pointless. It was a good way to get rid of items you didn’t want, but it fell into the same tedious back-and-forth that crafting did. Having the shop be a physical stand that NPCs come and buy things from was very cool to see the first couple of times.
The more you did it, though, the more it became about putting things on the selling tables and opening the shop to get those sold so you could put more on the table, rinse and repeat. It, much like the rest of crafting, became more of a chore, keeping from doing the things I wanted to do. It prevented me from exploring freely and from going on long adventures because I couldn’t leave my shop unattended, or it would be empty soon.
An empty store or unhappy customers means lower ratings, and lower ratings mean fewer customers and less money. This can be amended a bit once you get far enough into the game, so you can set up several selling tables, but until then, with just one table with three slots, it’s almost like the game doesn’t want you to utilize this part of the base.
An Oasis of Color
For some people, the color palette and visual design of Cloudheim will not capture their interest, but visually, the game is pretty stimulating. There’s a lot of color between the actual world design and the enemy design. That’s not to mention the colors of the various attacks and spells you can use.
In a world filled with so much color, it’s hard not to be a little charmed. The visual is simple by design to give you a sense of understanding and organization. This even applies to the visual design of enemies, puzzles, and materials. It makes it much easier to be selective about what you might want to break off and find.
Looking for something to make a fire weapon out of? Well, maybe try the glowing fire-colored rocks that you can break. There is still some random chance built in about how much you’ll get, but you’ll be able to spot most of what you want on intuition alone. What’s a little less intuitive is the mechanics of the game itself.
Mechanics Marvel or Monster?
No, the mechanics are not so bad that you could call them monstrous, although you may think they’re against you when you kick a mob in the wrong direction for the hundredth time. It can be a bit tough to get the hang of at first, and, in all honesty, it may never click completely. Though not that it doesn’t matter much, as it’s always satisfying to watch a group of enemies fall over after you use your perfect combo.
Since it is a physics-based combat system, everything you do is directional. Pointing in the wrong direction by half an inch? You just kicked that bomb into a wall for no reason. Things like that happen constantly as you try to learn how to master the art of this combat style. But something fascinating does happen when it all clicks.
You can manipulate the enemies into being where you want when you want and then dominate them with an all-out attack using all of your abilities. This is in special thanks to a fun system called Mana Burn. This system allows you to push past your limits and use abilities that are on cooldown to fill up a bar. When the bar is filled, you’ll be stuck waiting for it to diminish so you can get back to fighting.
It’s a very cool way to give players some more freedom over how they engage with combat and how they want to set up their loadout. Low damage skills that you can use over and over again, or maybe some hard-hitting attacks that wipe out a few enemies at a time? No matter what you choose, you can always try something different, which is a very nice change of pace.
Closing Comments
Cloudheim is, by all accounts, a good game, but it is marred by uncertainty about its direction. A sort of jack of all trades but master of none issue. It is very important to remember this game is still in its early days and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, in a few months, I think many of the issues I have with this game will either be solved or be on the way to being solved. Right now, though, Cloudheim struggles with its identity a little too much. If you can craft such a fun world to move about in, why punish me by giving me manual labor to do when I finally go home? The combat, when it works, is ludicrously fun. Using mobs like bowling balls and pins has never been better. The progression systems are a bit overwhelming, and there are probably a few too many in the game as a whole. Becoming a Nordic legend to save the world sounds amazing until you have to stop everything and deal with your overabundance of items in your inventory.
Pros & Cons
- Masterful movement
- Excellent combat
- Beautiful and well designed world
- Tedious inventory management
- Too many different progression systems
