Die For Valhalla! review

Die for Valhalla! is an action RPG from Monster Couch, where you possess the spirits of Viking warriors to hack, slash and crush enemies before you.

You play as Valkyrie, a supernatural maiden bestowed with the ability to possess fallen warriors and fight with them. You embark on a quest that will lead you through strange lands where Norse Mythology collides with Lovecraftian mythos. A bizarre but wonderful combination.

Featuring 2 game modes: Normal and Hardcore. Normal mode is obviously the easiest which is a beat-em up experience whereby you can revive allies in local co-op and find potions which have useful bonuses. The real challenge comes from Hardcore mode as there are no lives and permadeath is rife. There are even malicious potions to make things more difficult than they already are.

Generally as you progress you’ll find plenty of new content to wade through with 7 Viking classes with unique playstyles such as the archer or shielded warrior. Use ranged attacls with arrows as the archer but don’t get top close as you’re fairly squishy for health, whilst a shielded warrior can block incoming attacks but has slower movement. It’s nothing innovative, but still a nice mechanic for the game to have and to promote the use of using different classes.

If that’s not enough for you, there’s also a skill tree of over 80 skills to master as your Valkyrie, which will in turn make the combat and gameplay smoother and easier to apprehend enemies.

Despite not having the chance of playing local co-op, teaming up with 4 other Valkyries sounds like a straightforward idea and I can see it being a pretty enjoyable experience. One of the biggest problems for a lot of games with co-op that use this camera view is the ability to clearly see which character you are. With companions, Vikings and your Valkyries, this could be an issue.

My biggest quarral is the absence of online co-op as well as I feel it’s a neccessity for co-op games today. Most of us only have family members for local co-op and often than not these sort of games don’t appeal to all the family. The one game where it has appealed to everyone was Call of Duty Black Ops Zombies in my household, so it’s usually a rarity.

For a side-scrolling beat-em up title, Die For Valhalla! is a fairly enjoyable title with procedurally generated levels no experience will be the same and the extra of local co-op can mean double the fun or quadruple the fun in this case. My only concern is how long will you want to play essentially the same style of play over and over.