Valor Mortis Is a First-Person Soulslike That Tries to Do Too Much

Valor Mortis Begins as a Slow Soulslike but Becomes Most Convincing in Its First-Person Second Half

Spoiler warning: The article discusses major story turns, including William Dowsett’s return from the dead and the corruption affecting Napoleon Bonaparte’s war.

Background: A Familiar Soulslike Genre Meets a Napoleonic Nightmare

The soulslike genre has developed enough recognizable habits that players can identify them before the first fight begins. Stamina management during combat, the risk of losing progression after each death, health items, and enemies that respawn when the player reaches a bonfire, lantern, or another checkpoint have become common foundations. The strongest entries in the genre usually keep those foundations but reshape them with their own mechanics.

Valor Mortis follows that pattern, yet its main novelty is perspective. The game moves the action into a first-person view, giving its combat a different shape from the usual third-person soulslike structure. That perspective shift works best when the game is doing what it does most naturally: rewarding quick, patient fighting, especially through precise parries. The problem is that its story is weak, and its opening hours are sluggish. The game’s more compelling moments arrive later, in a second half that finally uses the potential built during the earlier stretch.

The player controls William Dowsett, a very British-sounding member of Napoleon’s army. William returns from the dead only to find former allies taken over by corruption sweeping across Europe. The corruption has twisted people in ways that turn familiar soldiers into nightmare forms. Large red boils replace the heads of riflemen. Infantrymen have their spines snapped as they are transformed into grotesque and rabid attack dogs. Piles of bodies have become living masses of flesh that slowly crawl toward the player when least expected.

This creates a familiar historical setting made unfamiliar by supernatural horror. William attempts to reconnect with missing comrades and understand how the war has found itself in this state. That search leads him to answers that will likely be far less surprising for the player than for him. The game’s central historical period is rarely used in action games, but Valor Mortis does not fully exploit the emotional or narrative weight that setting could carry.

Development Process: Slow Beginnings and a Halfway Turn

Valor Mortis’ story is frustratingly straightforward, and it wastes a setting so rarely used in action games. William’s slow realization that the war he has been waging on behalf of the bloodthirsty Napoleon Bonaparte might not be as noble as he assumed is annoyingly drawn out because it is so predictable. It is hard to get invested in a main character who has little more going for him than verbalizing his disgust over the consequences of a war he was recently proud to be part of, while remaining blissfully ignorant of the horrors he was unleashing on innocent citizens along the way.

Conversations with the game’s supporting cast do not help much either. None of them make a lasting impression, and the central plot moves forward with little dramatic tension. The game only becomes more interesting once it starts exploring the villages and cities besieged by Bonaparte and his corrupted forces. There, it finds more compelling stories to discover.

The player comes across brief echoes that capture fleeting conversations from the past. These echoes distill short, often heartbreaking stories. They effectively convey the desperation some civilians endured when faced with a foreign, oppressive force taking over their day-to-day lives. There is an entire city filled with orphans who scurry around underground tunnels. There is another city nearly entirely underwater after a heinous war crime extinguished a rebellion without care for civilian casualties. These locations are effective because they contextualize why so much of the world is desolate and broken without forcing the player to watch those events play out directly. They also do a good job of making the player hate an antagonist who is hardly ever seen.

That shift, however, takes time to arrive. Many of Valor Mortis’ opening hours take place across battlefields that, while twisted by the corruption around them, ultimately blend together in forgettable ways. These areas are almost strictly linear, with clear paths from beginning to end and only slight detours to explore.

Around the halfway mark, this monotonous world design changes. The player moves from abandoned villages to burning cities and down into labyrinthine catacombs beneath an eerily empty university. These spaces feel more like small hubs. They have smart shortcuts back to resting points, represented here as lanterns, which restock healing vials and respawn enemies. Compared with the opening hours, these later spaces feel more carefully considered.

Combat and Systems: First-Person Soulslike Ideas Take Shape

Valor Mortis’ combat is where it takes its biggest swings. Its shift to a first-person perspective is the most immediate and distinct change from typical soulslikes, but its split between melee and ranged combat and its multiple weapon options are equally impactful. The game remains about crowd control, stamina control, and a familiar reliance on parries. The tighter field of view makes it important to intelligently choose which enemies to engage and when, though off-screen markers help reduce frustrations that the perspective change might otherwise introduce.

Melee combat is fast and responsive. Parries are especially satisfying because their tight windows make many duels, especially those against bosses, exhilarating. The critical attack sound cues, whether triggered by a stealth attack or by breaking an enemy’s posture, are paired with violent, contextual executions that vary based on the weapons equipped. Ranged combat receives greater emphasis than in most other soulslike games, and the player is routinely challenged to pick off enemies from afar while juggling those within striking distance.

There is a range of offensive weapons and abilities on offer, each introduced as the player progresses through the story. Included are three types of swords: a rapier that excels at parries and building posture damage, a two-handed claymore that forgoes parries entirely in favor of slow, powerful, magically imbued attacks, and a well-rounded saber that balances damage and posture damage. Firearms are similarly varied, with a quick-firing pistol, a slow but powerful blunderbuss that is devastating at close range, and a two-handed musket that is great for picking off enemies from afar.

The player is also granted three transmutations, or magical abilities. These allow William to hurl fire at enemies, freeze them with stasis, or absorb and reflect their damage back at them. The game also gives him the ability to wall-run, which feels just as good as it did in developer One More Level’s Ghostrunner series.

Each weapon and ability has its own upgrade tree, with specific materials required to unlock each sequential node. The reviewer found enough materials to nearly max out each upgrade tree without specifically hunting for them. That allowed freedom to experiment without having to commit to specific configurations. This seems to be by design, because the player always has one sword equipped in the main hand and either a firearm or spell in the off hand, similar to Dishonored or BioShock 2, with the ability to swap either one at any time.

Despite that freedom, the reviewer was surprised by how little swapping between the various options was used. The saber, the first weapon given, fulfilled the player’s needs so perfectly that the rapier and claymore were only briefly tried before returning to the saber. The rapier’s slightly additional posture damage never made up for its inability to block attacks without perfect parries. The claymore is introduced so late and cannot perform parries at all, stripping out one of the most satisfying elements of the entire combat loop.

The same issue appears with the three transmutations. The reviewer found themselves mostly sticking to fire because of its effectiveness against most enemies. Building up enough stasis on enemies consumed more nephtoglobin, or mana, than it seemed worthwhile. The act of absorbing and returning damage with the third ability always felt clunkier in practice and less effective than sticking with the far more satisfying parrying mechanic. The other two abilities are used more often in environmental puzzles, though those puzzles are mostly used to initially explain how the abilities work. Afterward, the abilities go mostly ignored, and the game annoyingly fails to build on the gameplay design introduced early on.

Enemy variety is partly responsible for this problem. Valor Mortis features a relatively shallow pool of foes and takes a long time to start combining them in ways that force the player to consider specific approaches. The same slow-moving and weak infantryman appears in the first and last hours of the game. That repetition saps some of the satisfaction from combat, because the player is pulling off the same parries against the same attacks for hours on end.

As with the level design, this issue starts resolving itself once the player has the full complement of weapons and abilities. At that point, enemy combinations and slight variations start becoming more abundant. With more open spaces to explore and more opportunities to surprise the player with enemy placements, Valor Mortis’ combat eventually starts to shine. It is a pity that it takes so long to get there.

Current Stage: A Promising Core Held Back by an Uneven Start

The slow pacing may be a blessing or a curse depending on what the player comes to Valor Mortis for, but it has a noticeable knock-on effect that is difficult to ignore. Runbacks after death were far less tense because many areas felt familiar and, in many cases, sparse in enemies. Character progression is governed by an upgrade tree with no branching paths to commit to. It did not drastically change the way the player fought. Instead, it mainly gave a means to buff attributes and keep up with the escalating damage and health pools of enemies.

The reviewer rarely sought out a specific upgrade to help deal with new foes because the game had already trained the player to fight the same enemies over and over again. Boss fights offered some reprieve. They tend to feature a good variety of enemies, from large and lumbering to small and nimble, and they inject the combat with a sense of challenge and tension.

There are also many elements outside of combat that only start to click closer to the game’s climax. Early stages are so preoccupied with introducing new weapons and abilities and providing spaces to learn each one that they feel disjointed and unfocused. At one point, the player is taking out distant groups of enemies conveniently placed next to explosive barrels to showcase the effectiveness of the new musket. At another, the player is engaged in a long platforming sequence that requires stringing together wall runs and grapples while maintaining pace with a moving cart through a mine shaft.

Ultimately, these issues stem from a lack of restraint. There are too many disparate ideas that feel at odds with the best aspect of Valor Mortis, making the game feel directionless at times. The first-person combat is snappy and satisfying, but the limited enemy pool, underutilized weapons and abilities, and lack of consistent challenge prevent it from shining as consistently as it could.

Final Assessment: The Game Finds Its Strength After the Opening Hours

Valor Mortis betrays the heights it reaches in its second half. Its first-person combat is snappy and satisfying, but the limited enemy pool, underutilized weapons and abilities, and lack of consistent challenge ultimately prevent it from shining. The historical period is novel to explore with a dark, supernatural twist, but it does not play host to a wider, captivating story. It is only salvaged by shorter, emotionally charged vignettes that effectively convey the consequences of a war that its protagonist so naively comes to terms with.

The game has the bones of a great soulslike. It would benefit from a tighter focus on its engaging first-person combat and from trimming the superfluous mechanics that detract from the ones that work. Instead, Valor Mortis remains an uneven experience that delights as much as it disappoints.