As mentioned, you can bring up to six characters with you in battle. However, you can directly control only one character at a time, which means you have to leave the rest up to the customizable artificial intelligence. Switching characters is as easy as pressing the select button, but you'll rarely have any reason to do so. For each party member, you can allocate points to behavior parameters like attack, support, and cast magic. It's a simple way to program your team to behave the way you want it to, and for the most part, it works well.
It's not cheap to build a team of adventurers, though, and you have to be careful how you set up your party or you'll find yourself dying constantly. You can go to the guild in town and create a custom companion for a fee. You then choose a class, sex, and race, which all determine the stats of the character you create. Furthermore, you can assign subclasses to your characters to earn extra bonuses and abilities. The level of character customization in Valhalla Knights is impressive, and you'll wish the game let you put those characters to better use.
You can spend a good 40 hours grinding your way through the single-player game, but more tedium awaits if you can find a friend with a copy of the game so you can play cooperatively. The game supports two-player co-op via an ad hoc connection as long as each player has the game. Each player can choose up to three characters from his or her single-player campaign to take into the multiplayer matches. From there, you simply undertake various quests together. The quests in multiplayer are even simpler than the ones in the single-player game, sending you to complete mundane tasks like clearing enemies out of an area.
Valhalla Knights does at least look good, with interesting character design, colorful and varied backgrounds, and a wide variety of enemies. There's little in the way of special effects, though, so don't expect to see flashy battle animations or extensive summon sequences. As nice as the game looks, it doesn't run very well at all. With up to 12 characters in a battle at once, the frame rate often takes a dive. Outside of battle, the game usually keeps up a bit better, but then you have to deal with an uncooperative camera that gets stuck in doorways and behind walls. As a result of the bad camera, you'll often not be able to see where you're going, and you'll inadvertently stumble into a battle you didn't see coming. You can press the R button to realign the camera behind your character, but that works only about half of the time because the camera gets stuck when you're in confined areas. In addition to the poor frame rate and camera controls, the game freezes up every so often, usually while loading a new area after you step through a door.
If you're looking for an action role-playing game that just lets you kill monsters and collect treasure, Valhalla Knights will keep you occupied. If you're looking for anything more than that, you'll be sorely disappointed. It has the makings of a good role-playing game, but instead of bringing its best elements together around an engaging adventure, the game has you running through the same dungeon fighting the same monsters over and over again. After the first couple of hours of that, you'll be done with this game.
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