To earn a little extra scratch for your monster-slaying efforts, you can undertake quests at a guild that involve heading to a certain area and killing a predetermined number of a certain monster. Oddly, there's no indication of how much progress you've made toward completing a quest, so it's up to you to keep track of how many more creatures you need to slay before you can head back to town, collect your reward, and start the process all over again. What's more, you can only undertake one quest at a time, which is tremendously inconvenient and results in a whole lot of unnecessary back-and-forth travel. And while you can find items or learn spells that let you warp back to town from a dungeon, you can't warp back to where you came from. As a result, a very significant portion of your time is spent just passing through the same areas over and over again. And you can only save your progress at inns, so should you make your way deep into a dungeon, only to fall in battle, you'll once again have to hike all the way back from town. You might also get lost trying to find your way back because the dungeons are full of forking paths and the map only shows your immediate surroundings. Each of these frustrations could have been alleviated with basic features found in other RPGs, which makes their absence here baffling.
There's an option for two players to take up to three characters each on some missions that are as mundane as those found in the single-player game. Experience and items earned here carry over with your characters back to the single-player game, but if you're playing with someone whose characters are significantly more powerful than yours, you're liable to get slaughtered because the strength of the monsters appears to be on par with the more powerful characters in the group. You can also pit your party against your friend's characters in an arena battle in which the victor wins a wagered item or set amount of gold from the defeated player. It's more interesting than fighting the monsters you find throughout the dungeons, but not by much.
Valhalla Knights 2's visuals are unremarkable. The limited options for customizing the appearance of your characters are disappointing, and while towns have a quaint, charming design to the buildings with interiors that have some attractive touches, such as windows with light streaming in, the monster-infested areas in which you spend most of your time are bland, and lacking in detail. The action plays out smoothly, though, even with several party members and monsters battling it out at once. The sound is thoroughly lackluster, with repetitive music that may put you to sleep and muted sounds of battle that lack any sense of character or urgency.
Even if you're just looking for the satisfaction of killing monsters, leveling up your characters, and scoring some nifty loot, there are so many better options than Valhalla Knights 2 available out there. Thus, there's really no reason to bother with this tedious, frustrating, and generic dungeon crawler.
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Where to buy
Valhalla Knights 2 (PSP):
$27.99 - $29.99
| store | price | in stock? | rating |
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$29.99 | Yes |
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Buy.com
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$27.99 | Yes |
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