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Vallahalla Knights looks good, lacks action |
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Written by Justin Hoeger, MCT
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Friday, 01 June 2007 |
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VALHALLA KNIGHTS
2 stars
PUBLISHER: XSEED Games
SYSTEM: Sony PlayStation Portable
PRICE: $39.99
AGE RATING: 10-plus
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It may be a sizable dungeon crawl with a great degree of customization, but the action-role-playing game "Valhalla Knights" suffers from a serious lack of personality, among other flaws.
The plotline is threadbare. A player starts the game as an amnesiac human with a voice in his head. He or she has no memory of the past but hears a voice belonging to someone called Noir, who claims to be invisible but there to help.
From there, the game branches out into its single town, Paladi, and the player ventures into a vast, interconnected dungeon beginning with an old prison complex.
There's some story to unfold, but this game is more about grinding through scads of monsters and gathering new equipment and abilities for characters than about narrative. There is some talk of an evil Dark Lord, though.
Although the hero starts out alone, up to five other characters can be hired for company and combat backup. These guys don't add much in the way of personality, either; the player simply places an order at the town's Guild office for a party member, specifying race and job class, some money is exchanged, and voila! A new party member.
Aside from jack-of-all-trades humans, there are four other races. Elves are good with magic, Dwarves are good at fighting and Halflings are speedy and agile. Machines, the final race, are large units piloted by androids; they constitute their own job class as well.
Each race other than Machines can take on any job. The initial four jobs are Fighter (good with melee attacks), Mage (casters of attack magic), Thief (masters of ranged attacks) and Priest (users of healing magic). Four more jobs become available later on: Anchors are pumped-up magic users with access to both kinds of magic, Knights are strong in combat and can use healing magic, Samurai are devastating with their katanas, and Ninjas can attack with both melee and ranged weaponry.
Machines are unique and have their own equipment; they can use almost any weapon, though they can't use armor. All non-Machine characters can switch between available job classes at the town's Guild building. The Guild also is the place to go for quests, which reward the player in exchange for deeds done.
Most of the game is spent exploring the sprawling dungeon complex and battling the enemies within. As the party comes upon an enemy, the screen switches to a battlefield. The combat is in real time. The player controls one character, and the computer runs the rest (players can set up behavior patterns ahead of time), and both sides strike and cast spells at each other until one side is defeated. If the player wins, rewards are divvied out. If not, well, get ready to go through everything since the last saved game again.
The game is brutally hard even from the outset, items and equipment are expensive, and money is pretty scarce. A hint: Players are given enough money to recruit a single additional party member at the start of the game. Take a Priest, for example: Its healing magic doesn't cost 150 monies a pop. Healing potions do.
Two players can connect in Ad Hoc mode for duels or to team up on quests.
"Valhalla Knights" looks nice enough and has some decent music, but there are better action-RPGs to be had for the PSP, such as "Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony" or "Monster Hunter Freedom."
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