Valkyrie Elysium Review (PS5) – First things first, I’ve no history with the Valkyrie franchise. I missed the first games and have had Valkyrie Elysium as my introduction to the series.
But I still wanted to play it, because I couldn’t get the combat out of my head. It looked like a lot of fun, and now that I’ve been through the main campaign, it definitely was.
That isn’t to say it was all a smooth ride, unfortunately. While at the core of Valkyrie Elysium lies a fun action-adventure with combo-focused gameplay that keeps you driven towards better, flashier, and satisfying to pull off combos, one aspect of gameplay constantly gets in the way of the fun.
Unfortunately, the camera is a huge pain point, and sours the idea of going back for additional replays once you’ve seen everything through. A repetitive and ultimately dull game design culminating in a predictable end for the narrative doesn’t help either.
Valkyrie Elysium Review (PS5) – Ruined By The View
The Fate Of The World Is On You, Valkyrie
While Valkyrie Elysium’s characters and their own individual plights is what helped draw me to Valkyrie and each of her Einherjar.
The same does not go for the overall plot. The fate of the world is in your hands, Odin will constantly remind you, sitting from his lofty throne, surely not planning to use you for his own desires.
Valkyrie Elysium’s story is never a surprising one, and that’s including what’s meant to be a ‘big reveal’ right before it ends.
Don’t let that spoil it for you, however, because I don’t fully believe that’s meant to be Elysium’s draw.
There aren’t any other modes beyond the main story, but the combat is really what’ll keep you playing all the way through to the credits.
It also helps that the four loyal Einherjar you’ll recruit along the way can all have their own awkwardly funny moments.
It’s very endearing, and provides some much-needed charm to your time with Valkyrie Elysium.
Everything else about the story is very similar to what you might expect from an RPG. Get a party of ghost-friends together over the course of nine chapters, and in the end, you’ll have to fight God(s).
Combo Combo Combo
It’s immediately apparent that the reason to play Valkyrie Elysium is its combat. The stylized fighting is immensely cool to watch, particularly as you get closer towards the final chapters.
More than anything, you’ll be fighting waves of enemies in small, blocked out arenas that’ll form up around you and your attackers. It’s the real meat of the game, and it’s a very tasty patty.
Without even getting into what you Einherjar can bring to the table, you have an array of weapons at your disposal. Most of them are swords, with the odd spear.
However it’s not the variety that counts, but just how good any of them feel to wield. My particular favourites are your standard sword and a double-sided spear, which helps with enemy crowd control without slowing down the pace of the fight.
As you enhance your weapons, you unlock different moves, all of which you can practice in a training room on Asgard.
You’ll collect resources to upgrade your own abilities between Attack, Defense and Support, and you’ll have to balance those with how you upgrade your weapons.
Thankfully you’ll never feel too short up for anything, and even if you do need to grind for upgrades, it’s never an overbearing process since you’ll be thrown so many enemies in the first place.
Your Einherjar bring another important, and key factor to combat. Not only do they fight for your, and help distract all the enemy attention from you, the elemental abilities each of them have will apply to your weapons while they’re fighting.
If you have multiple Einherjar out on the battlefield, you can also swap between elemental abilities as you try to match the right weakness with the right foes.
Combining your magic attacks, with your Einherjar’s attacks, is incredibly cool. That’s part of Valkyrie Elysium’s key drive, it’s constantly a spectacle you can’t pull away from.
Stronger United
Your Einherjar are all powerful, and all helpful in battle, even beyond just matching them up with an enemies weakness.
They’re key to making it through the more difficult encounters you’ll face throughout all nine chapters.
This is, unsurprisingly, especially true when it comes to boss fights. Which are in fact the only element of the gameplay loop that doesn’t get repetitive, because each fight pits you against some new demonic creature that always makes your jaw drop.
That also goes for enemy design across the board. After a certain point you are simply seeing elemental re-skins of certain enemies, but the designs of all these creatures is interesting enough that I don’t think it takes anything away from them.
The fighting in Valkyrie Elysium is very intense, all the time, especially on the top end of the difficulty settings. Fighting with your Einherjar, and using them all in strategic ways keeps even the simplest fights fun and satisfying.
And though I personally found the voice lines annoying by the end, they do provide a stronger feeling of working with your Einherjar.
Fight Demons While Fighting The Camera
Unfortunately, even though I finished my playthrough of Valkyrie Elysium well under the suggested average of 20 hours, it still felt far too long because of how repetitive it ultimately became.
Don’t get me wrong, the combat is fun. But the level design, and everything that happens in between cutscenes becomes almost monotonous by the time you hit chapter nine.
Every ten steps you’ll find yourself surrounded by enemies again, needing to ready up for the next fight. It doesn’t help that some chapters take place in the same area, which resulted in the environments losing their luster.
Going back to the same areas also made the whole game feel like the same level design was used across the board.
It honestly soured a lot of the experience, but what made the repetitiveness feel worse was the simple fact that the camera in Valkyrie Elysium is atrocious.
I found it constantly catching on geography, on enemies. Getting stuck in corners was a constant issue, and resulted in more than a few unfair deaths.
As fun as the combat was, the moments where everything came together were only made possible by having to constantly fight the camera and lock on system.
It’s the thing that stops me from going back and doing another whole playthrough. There’s more side missions I could’ve done, weapons I might’ve upgraded, more time I think I would’ve like to spend in Valkyrie Elysium’s world.
Even with the repetitive combat, there’s still a certain feeling, or, more accurately, a vibe I felt playing Valkyrie Elysium – an almost PS2-era feel.
That vibe when you know a game you’re playing has good elements but maybe not all of them tweaked how they should.
A game you can recognize as not the best thing you’ve ever played, is very similar to other games you’ve played, but not nearly close to the worst.
Despite that it still fills your head as the only thing you want to play, because it hits the right comfort buttons in your brain that lulls you into a meditated state of combos and cool lights, and you forget everything else around those things.
If you understand the feeling I’m trying to convey, then you should understand just how bad the camera really is, to make me want to abandon a game that actually gets close to a PS2-era feel.
Which is probably one of the best things you can say about any game coming out today.
Ruined By The View
Valkyrie Elysium is by no means a bad game. It’s a very good game, actually, and there’s a lot I think players can find fun and charming, whether they be a Valkyrie old-hat or newcomer to the franchise.
The combat is fun, which makes it easier to swallow the monotony of the level design that can start to make combat encounters feel laborious.
And even though the narrative is nothing to be desired, the core cast of characters all have an undeniable charm. An element that can even cause some of the endings available to tug at your heartstrings a bit more.
Having to fight the camera however to enjoy any of it unfortunately ruins the experience quickly.
I was invested enough to make it to the credits once, but anything beyond that just doesn’t feel worth the effort of battling my right thumbstick the whole time.
If you’re a fan of the Valkyrie franchise, there’s a stronger chance you’ll be able to tolerate the camera issues with better resolve, and thus are likely to have a more enjoyable time.
Newcomers and anyone else on the edge though, should play the demo before diving into the full thing.
Valkyrie Elysium is available on PS5 and PS4.
Review code generously provided by the publisher.