Despite the customizable elements and the real time battle system, Valhalla Knights relies on tried and true RPG story mechanics. After an initial battle sequence which introduces players to the control mechanics, the player has to create an avatar that conveniently wakes up with amnesia, and sets off on an adventure to rediscover his/her past. Along the way, the player will find that a Dark Lord has seized control of the land and filled it with dark creatures – and guess who gets to solve the mess. Kill the Dark Lord, bring peace to the land, ride unicorns and shoot rainbows from your arse. Okay, we made that last bit up, but it sounded a lot more fun that way. Valhalla Knights does involve a lot of odd elements though, but in a manner that’s very typical of your average Japanese RPG.
Get off my lawn you dang kids!
Valhalla Knights is built almost exclusively around dungeon crawling. Players are required to choose a character class and gender for their avatar before being able to access some minor customization options. The game actually takes place in one extremely large dungeon which is broken down into a series of smaller dungeons with different themes. The main point of the game is simply to fight your way through the dungeon and kill any monsters that get in the way. Of course, things get more complicated than that when you throw the odd bit of questing into the equation, but it never really gets away from the whole dungeon thing. The worst bit about the questing is that the game is entirely vague about what needs to be accomplished in each task, often leaving the player high and dry.
One particular thing that players will find extremely annoying about the giant dungeon in Valhalla Knights is that it is not very well structured or designed– the environments within the dungeon can change with absolutely no transition or explanation, and players can get stuck having to travel on foot through sections of the dungeon they have already cleared if they are defeated in combat. But of course, all of the monsters in the game respawn, so you’re going to have to clear those areas out again on your way through, which is absolutely painful. A number of warp points can be found at various locations throughout the dungeon, but attempting to find them requires – yes – a whole lot more grinding and battling against incredibly stupid monsters. Character progress is a major issue, with simply following the story not being enough to take on the boss creatures – players will be forced to grind for many extra hours, and that doesn’t help when the game is pretty tedious to begin with.
Cold blooded killah!
Valhalla Knights’s battle system is largely responsible for the game’s high degree of tedium. It is a real time affair that basically just involves holding the R button to lock onto a monster, mashing the X button until it is dead, rinsing and repeating until the battle is over. There are some other special charge attacks that can be executed with the triangle button after being charged up, as well as the usual magical attacks and such. Up to six soldiers can be recruited to fight alongside the player character, but one quickly finds that their AI assistants are rather intellectually challenged, with a cranial capacity equivalent to something like a dead skunk. Your recruits can also be fully customized like the main character, but be weary that the cost involved in assembling a full squad is substantial, and involves much more pointless grinding. It’s good to have a varied squad that will do a large degree of the fighting for you, as it really becomes mind numbingly dull after the first half hour.
The arduous grind of Valhalla Knights is likely to take players more than 40 hours to complete – and in that time, there is never a moment where the game actually feels fun or rewarding. It is like the homework assignment equivalent of a video game. The game takes place in the one dungeon, and the side quests on offer never really give the feeling of variety – it’s just one button mashing fight after the other until the quest has been completed. The game also has support for ad-hoc wireless multiplayer; two players can go head to head and duke it out in three-a-side combat, or alternatively, players can join forces and work together in thirty-odd quests. Again, just like the rest of the package, Valhalla Knights’s two player experience just is not the slightest bit fun.
Staring at walls is about as fun as it gets
Despite the drudgery of its gameplay, Valhalla Knights does actually manage to impress in some areas of its presentation. Emphasis on some – the character designs and hand drawn portraits are particularly nice, but the environments are awfully dull and suffer from fairly low grade textures. Animation and player models also are not much to write home about – the player character’s model and the models of the player’s squad are fine, but every single non-player character in the game is wretchedly ugly. The game is particularly lacking in flashy special effects, which we all love in our RPGs. The system begins to struggle when there is any more than 12 characters on screen – which basically means the player needs to limit the number of members of his or her squad in order to make sure the game is still playable. Worse still, Valhalla Knights’s camera system appears to have come from the fifth plane of Hell – it gets stuck on everything and is an absolute pain to manage. The game’s sound is nothing to write home about, with a forgettable soundtrack, no voice track and uninteresting sound effects.
When a person wants to play a video game, they are generally after a fun experience. Valhalla Knights is in no way a fun experience; it is actually quite the opposite – it feels more like work than play. There are not very many games on the market that are this much of a chore to play – it is easily the least exciting game we’ve played this year. That’s just the start of it though – Valhalla Knights has a wretchedly cliché premise, technical issues, derivative game mechanics and terrible level design. Not even the most die-hard RPG fan can justify wasting $70 and 40 hours playing this mess of a game.
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