Developer One More Level takes a bold swing at a familiar genre in this Valor Mortis review, shifting the soulslike formula into first-person with BioShock-style powers. Set in a twisted alternate history of the Napoleonic era, the game pairs swordplay and firearms with supernatural abilities channeled through your hand.
Table Of Content
Across its roughly 20-hour campaign, Valor Mortis also weaves in Titanfall-style wall-running and strange 19th-century locales filled with zombified French soldiers. While technical bugs and uneven ideas hold it back, the sheer creativity on display still makes this punishing action game worth experiencing.
Combat, Builds, and BioShock-Inspired Powers
Combat centers on a satisfying split between your dominant hand for swashbuckling melee and your corrupted left hand for guns and magic. For instance, you can ignite an explosive barrel from afar, parry a charging enemy, and step back to finish them off with a pistol shot.
Furthermore, a varied arsenal helps offset the limited enemy variety and repetitive monster attack patterns. You wield three melee weapons, three guns, and three hand powers, each featuring its own upgrade tree to customize effects like detonating burning foes with gunfire or restoring saber stamina after a dodge.
Beyond weapon upgrades, a skill tree of perks boosts your health and parries, while modifiers called Ambers reshape how you play. Equipping Ambers that heal you on posture-breaking executions alongside the Perfectionism mod—which raises damage at full health—creates a fast, high-reward playstyle.
Alternate History Setting, Story, and Bosses
You play as William, an undead soldier in Napoleon's army in a timeline where winning at Waterloo warped the world into a grim, surreal nightmare. However, the narrative's generic war-is-hell message and forgettable cast struggle to land, especially when jarring moments suddenly drop you into Egypt to battle a sphinx-like creature.
Even so, the bizarre setting fuels memorable level design, from battlefields littered with horse corpses and bayonets to a harbor of wrecked naval ships floating in midair. You will also trudge through a toxic flooded village and creep through a ruined town where surviving children use their small size to navigate the wreckage.
Unfortunately, boss encounters represent one of the weakest parts of the experience. Bosses appear rarely, often recycle tougher versions of standard enemies, and usually devolve into waiting for heavily telegraphed swings so you can parry and break their posture.
Valor Mortis Review Verdict: Platforming and Technical Polish
In this Valor Mortis review, the biggest hurdle is how rough the overall package feels in motion. Melee strikes against large enemies sometimes hit strange invisible borders, while foes occasionally swing at empty air or stand idle.
Meanwhile, the platforming feels surprisingly tacked on given One More Level's track record with the Ghostrunner series. Grappling, wall-running, and conjuring distant platforms with your hand powers are fun when they click, yet snagged ledges and clipping through geometry frequently break the momentum.
Worse still, technical issues plague the journey, including missing environmental pieces, hard crashes, and a recurring Steam launch bug that shut off the test PC. Ultimately, Valor Mortis feels duct-taped together at times, but its imaginative world and flexible combat still deliver a compelling ride.
Source: Valor Mortis Review
