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Product summary
You'll find monsters, loot, and frustrations galore lurking in the shadows of this tedious dungeon crawler.
Specifications: ESRB: Everyone 10 and older; Genre: Role-Playing; Number of players: 1 Player See full specs
Price range: $27.99 - $29.99
Gamespot editors' review
- Reviewed on: 10/22/2008
- Updated on: 10/23/2008
- Released on: 10/01/2008
Creating your own band of characters, taking them on dangerous quests, then watching them slowly become richer, more powerful, and equipped with much cooler gear can be a powerfully engrossing experience. Valhalla Knights 2 proves that it can also be extremely tedious and frustrating. This rote dungeon crawler for the PSP is not worth even a few minutes of the countless hours it will try to take from you.
The story here is standard and uninteresting. In ages past, a battle raged in the kingdom between the destructive Goddess of Judgment and the noble Witch of the Crystal. Now the conflict between their acolytes stirs anew, and your character joins an anti-Goddess order of knights and sets off for war. The story advances in fits and starts, moving at a snail's pace. The overwhelming majority of your time will also be spent engaged in action that has no real connection to it. This isn't a story-driven game by any stretch. The plot is more of an afterthought than an integral part of the experience. It's just a flimsy structure on which to hang all of the dungeon-crawling you'll be doing.
That would be fine if the dungeon-crawling were more compelling. Unfortunately, the gameplay is marred by a number of frustrations that make the whole experience a real chore. You start by creating a character, which is a simple process that involves choosing from one of five races and one of five jobs. Then you select from a handful of different face and hairstyle options. The job you choose at the start--be it fighter, mage, priest, thief, or monk--doesn't limit your experience later. You can switch between jobs at any time, and you'll end up creating playable ally characters for your party as well, so you'll experience each of the available jobs during your time with the game.
As you navigate your way through the numerous monster-infested dungeons, battling bees, bunnies, dragons, mushrooms, pixies, insects, robots, and all manner of other creatures, there are no random encounters. You see all the foul beasts moving about on the world map, and coming into contact with any of them sends you into battle. You're tossed into the thick of battle without any kind of tutorial, although you can read up on all the details in the manual. If the game took a moment to familiarize you with the options during combat, however, it would have been helpful because there are lots of them. On the other hand, the game's real-time battles tend to go by so fast--in such a quick flurry of blows--that you probably won't end up using many of the available options much anyway. To access magic spells, for instance, you need to call up a menu, indicate the spell you wish to cast, and then select the target for the spell. That may not sound like much, but considering how fast things are happening, it's actually a significant amount of time. Because there's no option to pause the action to issue commands, having spells and items buried in a few layers of menus limits their effectiveness during battle. You may be better off setting your AI-controlled allies to handle such things as casting healing spells while you do the grunt work of running up to enemies and hitting the attack button. You can have up to six members in your party, and your companions tend to stick to the behaviors you designate for them, which makes them effective support. In any case, the combat is simple and shallow, lacking both the strategic depth found in many role-playing games, as well as the visceral fun found in good hack-and-slash action RPGs. That's a shame because you'll need to do an awful lot of it in Valhalla Knights 2.
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Where to buy
Valhalla Knights 2 (PSP):
$27.99 - $29.99
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$27.99 | Yes |
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