Like an aggressively competitive thane in a reindeer piss-swallowing contest, 2D tac-and-slash roguelite Sons of Valhalla never lets up. Whether you’re charging through pixel-art battlefields, slashing and burning increasingly impregnable strongholds, or making quick decisions to gain the upper hand in tug-of-war tactics, the only times Thorald isn’t deploying icy violence, ordering others to deploy icy violence, or upgrading his camps so he can act in a colder, more brutal way are when he’s restoring stamina with a chilly sip of mead or fervently gnawing on health-boosting meat.
Viking Thorald Olavson is possessed. A rival Jarl has burned his village and stolen his wife Raya. In his quest to find her, he will do anything – even visit England. As Thorald, you will climb the ranks of command in search of Raya across six stages, each set somewhere between side-scrolling tactics Kingdom of Two CrownsWarpips online strategy and the edgy/angular/shooty/perilous gameplay of any 2D RPG you can imagine.
There’s even a touch of roguelite. Every time you die, you have to sacrifice an upgrade rune collected from certain enemies. It sounds like an overwhelming mishmash, but SOV takes each of these concepts in stride, ham-fistedly gnawing only on the elements that are imperative to its astonishingly powerful momentum and the charm of “cult flash game you all skipped sociology on, and when the teacher came to scold you, you forgot and just watched a bit of it.” (I mean purely in terms of taste and focus. You’d be hard-pressed to find an venerable flash game with pixel art this good.)
At ARPG level, Thorald is a force of nature after just a few upgrades, either runic or purchased from the bases in the mead hall for a scarce resource. He can cut down enemies three at a time and is quick enough with a quiver to make his resigned opponents shiver in their colorful Nesquik panties. Later, you’ll unlock a pot/grater/flame combo so hideously broken that I’d complain if it weren’t so much fun, if the exquisitely grim enemy frying animations, which I imagine took someone weeks of work, weren’t so brilliant. In the latter stages, you’ll be single-handedly destroying entire camps.
Not at first, but that’s where the replenishment of your warbands comes into play. One of the first things the game teaches you is the “shield wall” command: shields in front, archers in back. Very effective. Then you go and kill all your shield boys in your first attack, and you can’t build any more until you buy an upgrade. Whatever! Set up a barracks and a few resource buildings, and you’ll soon have a nice group of marauders on your side. As you progress through the game, you’ll gain access to everything from shieldmaidens to siege weapons. Enemies spawn hacksilver, hacksilver spawns mead hall upgrades, and mead halls spawn fresh building slots. Your unit limit increases as you build and acquire more. It’s always tiny enough to be considered, but generally immense enough to create a diverse force. Some units are very specialized, so the more of them you unlock, the more essential the limit will become in your plans, especially as enemy barricades become extremely fortified in later levels.
Despite the fact that this main loop is set from the start, variety is something that Sons Of Valhalla absolutely hits the nail on the head, keeping all the venerable essentials while consistently building on top of its baseline on both sides and developing the same tug-of-war in both intensity and complexity. The press kit tells me there are over 40 enemy types, and I believe it. After each stage, you’ll be faced with a cartoonishly evil boss, capped by nostalgic headshot chatter reminiscent of retro beat ’em ups. It’s, as I said, incredibly charming. Brutal and probably traumatic for a few characters, sure, but I’m not sure if the story is meant to be taken seriously or if it’s meant to provide a kitschy, high-flying adventure framework for all the looting and promises of revenge. It’s much more in the style of Asterisk and Obelisk than The Norseman. Plus, the music is decidedly rowdy.
Commanding troops can be a pain at times, mind you. They like to shield in the wrong direction if there are warm troops behind them trying to catch up, and sometimes you have to run around and spam “follow me” to cancel the “attack” command and force them to “hold position” while you build up your forces. Overall, though, it’s a nicely condensed four-button menu that does what it’s supposed to do, as do your troops.
You know when I said the game won’t let up, up there? Like the game did to me, I’ve actually just done a quickie for you. And, like the game did to me, I’m going to stick a large “What? Why?” slice of cake right into the middle of your experience. This. Is. A. Textual. Interpretation. A. Tempo. Blockade. Set their houses on fire with manure and straw! Robbing their women! Pickling their prized cattle! Disfigure their likenesses with feeble and feeble mustaches so that everyone doubts the virility of their pathetic gods! Tiptoe past them while they sleep and distract those who are awake by throwing pottery! Wait, wait. Scratch that last one, because it’s counterintuitive to the Viking experience, certainly the least hidden experience there is.
I don’t know about you, but it’s scarce that I find myself so engrossed in a game with such cacophonous momentum that I think to myself, “You know what I’d really like right now? An annoyingly long stealth section, playing as a different character with completely new things to learn that will never come up again.” I’ll try to give that section a fair chance, but while I, a retrospective critic, understand and even appreciate why this dreary, sticky party was included, the reality is that playing it was a uninteresting ache with the occasional acute pain. Not stabbing pains, mind you, because stabbing would have been way too much fun.
Yes, it happens right in the middle of the game, as a fitting interlude to break up the action. Yes, it gives the story a sense of scale. And yes, it kind of stops Raya from just being “Thorald’s Wife” and allows her to be a capable character in her own right for a while. I’m not bemoaning the presence of this section, just its execution. Just give the woman an axe! Hell, give her a boltgun and I’ll be fine with that. Maybe a scaled-down version of the main loop, where Raya leads an army of warm sewer rats to assist take down the prison guards? That would transform Sons Of Valhalla from “great game with this confusingly bad stealth game in the middle” to “great game with rat tactics.” You could call it “rat-ticks”! I’d applaud if you did that!
But wait! It’s over! Raya crawls out of the sewer, kicks the guard in the face a few times, and oh look, the game is great again. Sure, at this point Thorald starts to get so powerful that the bosses are more fun for the novelty of it than the difficulty, and sure, you’ve probably mastered the game’s loop, so the last few stages are easier than the first. But there are more difficulty options – the one above “Normal” is probably ideal if you want something really tough – and there’s nothing wrong with a victory lap.
There are still many intricacies you’ll discover as you play. For example, every second outpost you destroy provides a forest camp instead of a standard base, allowing you to recruit mercenaries and trade resources; adding another layer of tactical balancing to consider. The real combat takes place in your mind! Quite a few of the runes you’ll get aren’t specific to Thorald, adding buffs or fresh tricks to specific unit roles. There’s also a horde mode that gives you a huge unit limit to start with and tinkers with the campaign rhythm by giving you a set cooldown to prepare – time you’d normally have to literally carve out yourself, finding reasonable breaks in the action to return and upgrade.
I came very close to getting Bestest Best on this one, but that awful stealth section, combined with the game’s inability to put up a real fight exactly when it needed it most, held me back. But up until the halfway point and for a long time after that, I had a great time with Sons Of Valhalla. It keeps the ARPG action within the proper bounds of tactics, and keeps the tactical pace to match the intense and direct combat. It’s wonderfully scored and animated. It doesn’t overdo it, but gives you an extra mode and thoughtfully tuned difficulty settings if you want to dive back in. And even with my complaints, I’m joyful to do so. Barkeep, more reindeer piss.
This review is based on the version of the game provided by publisher Hooded Horse.
