Valor Mortis | The Final Preview

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Jesse Norris

15 minutes ago

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We have gotten to play through the first four chapters of Valor Mortis, the upcoming first-person soulslikes from the developers behind the Ghostrunner franchise. It’s lean, mean, and full of interesting ideas.

Water Water Loo, Where Are You?

Valor Mortis takes place in a cursed version of European history, where Napoleon never fell, and his wars never ended. The Crimson Plague has beset the land, with your soldier character being brought back to life by a mysterious figure after dying in action.

It is an interesting premise, made all the better by the excellent Vincent Caselle as the ever-present voice of Napoleon. This supernatural alt-history is a miserable, disgusting world, exactly what any good Souls-like needs.

Wide, linear levels take you through beautiful countryside filled with shambling corpses. Burning villages are filled with monsters, bodies, and endless amounts of viscera. I’ve played through the first four chapters in just under four hours. Developers had told us to expect eight to ten.

I always seem to end up running through things more quickly in Souls-likes. What sets Valor Mortis apart is its perspective. One More Level, best known for the Ghostrunner games, stays true to its roots with a first-person perspective.

Coureur Fantôme

As the game is due out in a few weeks, I’ll keep this preview short and sweet. For any fans of soulslikes, know that Valor Mortis successfully brings the dodge-and-parry-focused melee combat the genre is known for into first-person.

A robust ranged system adds to that, with a pistol and blunderbuss available during my playtime. The pistol can break weak points on enemies for big damage. The blunderbuss is a monster at close range, able to take out four or five enemies at a time if they’re close enough.

Combat heavily relies on a parry system. As any enemy goes to attack you, if the attack is not glowing red, you can parry it with a well-timed block. Do this enough- only once on fodder types- and you can pull off an execution. Bosses and tankier enemies will receive massive damage.

There are plague-powered supernatural abilities, with the preview build giving us access to a gout of flame or the ability to slow down — and even stop — time. Mix in a bevy of movement abilities, including a grapple and wallrunning, and the game begins to feel like the lessons and talented developer has learned over the years.

Honor in Death

As this is a soulslike, you will die a lot. When you do, you’ll drop your acquired currency, gained via killing enemies. To gain it back, you’ll need to reach the area where you died.

To heal, you have flasks, which only replenish when you use your bonfire-equivalent checkpoints. Level design features numerous shortcuts opened up after going in circular patterns while fighting or evading enemies.

There is light stealth in the game, with your right-trigger attack allowing you to execute enemies from behind when out of combat. Graphically, the game looked and ran well on my 5080 and 5800X GPU/CPU combo.

The voice acting was roundly solid, with the player character having a damned sexy voice. You can make dialogue choices, and I am curious how that may or may not change the outcome of the story.

See You in October

Valor Mortis has made a solid impression with these first four chapters. The story is starting to get interesting; it plays great, and it’s available day one in Game Pass. Keep an eye on DayOne closer to launch, as we should have a full review ready once we’re allowed to.