I’ve gotta hand it to the people at developer One More Level: after well over a decade of countless variations on the soulslike formula, I’ll admit that going first-person with BioShock-like magical abilities shooting out of your hand in an alternate history of the Napoleonic era is… a pretty darn original idea, actually. Valor Mortis is a punishing action game that tries a whole lot of compelling stuff, from combat that mixes sword fighting, spell slinging, and firearms, to the platforming sections that have you wall-running around like you’re in Titanfall, to the bizarre 19th-century setting that kept me guessing. These experiments work out for the most part, and I have many fond memories of dying again and again as I fought my way through this bleak world full of zombified French soldiers. But there are also plenty of moments when this hodgepodge of ideas doesn’t quite come together, not to mention numerous bugs and crashes that turned an otherwise good time into my own personal Waterloo. So while the 20-hour campaign can be a bit uneven, there are still enough interesting things going on in Valor Mortis to make it well worth playing.
If you’ve ever played a BioShock game, you’ll probably feel unexpectedly at home here. Valor Mortis shamelessly cribs the channeling-magic-powers-in-your-corrupted-left-hand concept, and also has the whole alternate history thing going for it as well. But instead of blasting your way through enemies with guns, you’ll mostly be getting up close and personal with a sword, parrying, dodging, and getting killed a whole bunch in the time-honored tradition of the soulslike. It’s an odd combination of things that works out better than I expected, as using your dominant hand for swashbuckling and your off-hand for guns and magical abilities makes for exciting encounters. For example, you might use your mutated arm to light an exploding barrel on fire from afar to take out a group of baddies, block an enemy that’s aggressively rushing you, then back away to finish them off with a pistol. Having so many options for how to deal with deadly enemies helped to hold my interest longer than Valor Mortis otherwise would have, especially given its overall lack of enemy variety.
You play as William, a soldier in Napoleon’s army in an alternate reality where the legendary emperor defeated his enemies at Waterloo, which… well, caused the world to look like a disturbing piece of abstract art, I guess. As an undead warrior with supernatural powers and the ability to come back from death as many times as you need, you fight your way through a series of depressing, war-ravaged areas, meeting a few mostly forgettable characters along the way. Valor Mortis might give off BioShock vibes, but when it comes to story, it falls quite short. It delivers a fairly generic “war is hell” message that’s undermined completely by the silly stuff happening around you, like that time you’re walking in a cave and suddenly find yourself in Egypt fighting off some kind of Spinx thing? I dunno, man. In any case, I’d still say this tries much harder than the average soulslike, but ends up being mostly disappointing.
Valor Mortis’ biggest shortcoming is that, possibly because it tries so many things at once, it can be quite a rocky ride, and that includes its combat. Some of it is minor, weird stuff, like how if you’re fighting big enemies, it feels like you’re hitting them with a pool noodle from several feet away due to some really strange invisible borders. But there are also more concerning issues, like the fact that sometimes enemies will just aim their aggression in a completely different direction, attacking the air or even just standing there while you kill them. And like lots of its peers, Valor Mortis also has that issue where each of the enemies only has a few attacks, so you’ll often just be waiting for them to repeat the same series of strikes for the third time in a row before you can finish them off with an execution. While fighting these gross monsters usually feels just fine, these shortcomings crop up with regularity.
However, a decently sized arsenal of weapons and powers helps to break up that monotony. You have three different melee options, three guns for toting, and three powers to turn your poor hand into a monstrous weapon of war – each with their own upgrade tree to customize how that ability works. For example, you can upgrade your flame ability so that enemies explode if you shoot them with a gun after lighting them on fire, or you can upgrade your saber so that it restores your stamina when you attack after successfully executing a dodge.
Beyond that, you’ve also got a whole skill tree full of perks to choose from and modifiers to equip that help you customize your build a little. Perks offer ways to help William survive a bit better by upping his health or making his parries more effective, but the mods (called Ambers) are more interesting, since they can actually alter the way your character works to suit your playstyle. In my case, I equipped a bunch of mods that made it easier to top off my health, like one that healed me whenever I performed an execution on an enemy whose posture I’d broken – I then equipped another called Perfectionism, which made me do substantially more damage when I was at full health. This allowed me to be a deadly perfectionist, who was rewarded with speedier skirmishes when I successfully managed to avoid taking hits.
Most soulslikes are defined by their memorable boss fights, and this is one area where Valor Mortis feels strangely out of the loop. First off, there are shockingly few of them, to the point where you can make several hours of forward progress without running into one. Secondly, when you eventually do, they are often underwhelming, especially the ones that are just beefier versions of existing enemies or repeated foes you’ve already fought. But even when they are original encounters, they all have the same issue: you’ll mostly just stand around waiting for the boss to pepper you with a ridiculously telegraphed attack so that you can parry it and counter once you’ve broken their posture. I died way more fighting random enemies and falling off of ledges than I did against these wimpy, disappointing bosses. Frankly, it’s probably a good thing there are so few since most aren’t very memorable, and battling through each of the levels against regular minions is much more consistently enjoyable.
One of the best parts about Valor Mortis’ weird-as-heck setting is that it makes for levels that are fairly unique, like the torn-up 19th-century battlefields filled with scattered horse corpses and discarded bayonets, or a harbor of destroyed naval ships that have been raised up into the air unnaturally. You still have plenty of soulslike cliches, like one part where you navigate a flooded village overcome by toxic waters (effectively your poison swamp level if it were created by war crimes), but I was pleasantly surprised by how many areas had personality or some kind of compelling component to pique my interest. For example, one level had me creeping around a ruined town where the only survivors were children who had learned to use their small size to their advantage. Working my way through the destruction while doing my best to gain the favor of these creepy kids was a neat and memorable section that has definitely stuck with me.
Valor Mortis also tries its hand at a bit of platforming, and while I expected it to be pretty top-notch considering the studio’s track record with the Ghostrunner series, most of this sadly feels unpolished. I got caught on ledges, fell through the environment, passed through objects I shouldn’t have, and more, all of which really took the wind out of my sails. To its credit, these parts certainly try some interesting stuff, like one bit where you gain the ability to make platforms appear from afar using one of your nifty hand powers, and grappling through the air and wall running around is quite awesome when it works. But this feels like something that was a little tacked on, given how inconsistently it feels good.
I’ve mentioned a few times that Valor Mortis sometimes feels a bit janky. Some of that is due to specific game design choices and experimentation that doesn’t quite work out, but a much bigger share of that unpolished feel is due to the large amount of technical issues Valor Mortis has. I saw hard crashes, a recurring issue that straight up turned off my PC when I tried to launch from Steam, entire pieces of the environment completely missing, and tons of other wonkiness – the package just has a fairly duct-taped feel to it, which distracted from my journey through this compelling ruined world at times.