Review: Walter Mortis

A novel full of intriguing ideas, even if they don't always flow perfectly.

I've got to give it to the folks at developer One More Level: after more than a decade of countless tweaks to the ghost-like formula, I'll admit that going first-person with BioShock-like magical abilities that fly out of your hands in a Napoleonic-era alternate history is a really bad initial idea. Valor Mortis is a punishing action game that tries a lot of compelling things, from combat that mixes sword, spell, and gunfights, to platforming sections that make you run into walls like Titanfall, to weird 19th century environments that kept me guessing. These experiments work for the most part, and I have many fond memories of dying over and over again on my way through this bleak world filled with zombified French soldiers. But there are also plenty of moments when this pile of ideas doesn't quite come together, aside from the numerous bugs and glitches that turned a good time into my personal Waterloo. So while the 20-hour campaign might be a little bumpy, there's still some cool stuff in Valor Mortis that's worth playing.

If you've ever played BioShock, you'll probably feel unexpectedly at home here. Valor Mortis shamelessly ruins the channeled magical powers in your left-hand concept and also advances the entire alternate history for it. But instead of running through enemies with a gun, you'll be getting up close and personal with a sword, dodging, dodging, and killing a whole bunch in the old Ghost tradition. It's a strange combination of things that works better than I expected, as using your dominant hand to shoot and losing your hand for weapons and magical abilities makes for exciting encounters. For example, you might use your mutant arm to light an exploding barrel from afar to take out a group of bad guys, block an enemy rushing you hard, then jump back to finish them off with a pistol. Having so many options for how to deal with mortal enemies helped me last longer than Valor Mortis would have otherwise, especially given the overall lack of enemy variety.

You play as William, a soldier in Napoleon's army in an alternate reality where the legendary emperor defeated his enemies at Waterloo, which...well, I guess, the world looks like a disturbing work of abstract art. As an undead warrior with supernatural powers and the ability to come back from the dead as many times as you need to, you fight your way through a series of depressing and ravaged war zones, encountering some forgettable characters along the way. Valor Mortis may have a BioShock vibe, but it falls short when it comes to story. It delivers a fairly generic "war is hell" message that's completely undermined by the silly things going on around you, like when you're walking through a cave and suddenly find yourself in Egypt. Fighting some sort of sphinx thing? I don't know, man either way, I'd still say it's a lot harder than the average person, but it's ultimately frustrating.

Valor Mortis' biggest flaw is that it can be quite a rocky ride, possibly because it's trying so many things at once, and that includes its combat. Some of it is minor and weird stuff, like how if you're fighting big enemies, you'll feel like you're hitting them with a pool noodle from a few feet away due to really weird invisible boundaries. But there are more troubling issues, like sometimes enemies just aim their attack in a completely different direction, attack in the air, or even just stand there when you kill them. And like many of its counterparts, Valor Mortis has a problem where each enemy only has a few attacks, so you'll often be waiting for them to repeat the same series of attacks for the third time in a row before you can finish them off with an execution. While fighting these large monsters usually feels good, these shortcomings show up regularly.

Enemies only have a few attacks, but your arsenal helps break up this monotony.

However, a decent-sized arsenal of weapons and powers helps break up this monotony. You have three different melee options, three weapons to mount and three powers to turn your poor hand into a monstrous melee weapon - each with its own upgrade tree to customize how that ability works. For example, you can upgrade your flame ability so that enemies explode if you shoot them with a gun, or you can upgrade your saber to restore your stamina when attacking after successfully executing a dodge.

Beyond that, you also have a full skill tree full of perks to choose from and modifiers to equip to help you customize your build a bit. Perks offer ways to help William survive a little better by increasing his health or making his plays more effective, but mods (called Ambers) are more interesting because they can actually change how your character works to suit your playstyle. As for me, I equipped a bunch of mods that made it easier to recover my health, such as one that healed me whenever I executed on an enemy whose status I broke – then I equipped another called Perfection, which made me deal more damage when I was at full health. This allowed me to be a deadly perfectionist, rewarding myself with faster engagements when I managed to avoid getting hit.

Most Ghosts are defined by their memorable boss fights, and this is one area where Valor Mortis feels oddly out of the loop. First of all, there are very few of them, so much so that you can go several hours without working on one. Second, when you finally do, they're often weak, especially the ones that are just stronger versions of your current enemies or recurring enemies. You've fought before, but even when they're main encounters, they all have one problem: you're mostly standing around waiting for the boss to hit you with a ridiculous telegraph attack so you can deal with it after breaking his status. I lost far more lives fighting random enemies and falling off ledges than I did against these frustratingly frustrating bosses. To be honest, it's probably a good thing there are so few of them, since most of them aren't very memorable, and it's much more fun to fight through each of the levels with regular minions.

One of the best parts of Valor Mortis' strange setting is that it creates fairly unique levels, such as 19th-century battlefields littered with the scattered corpses of horses and discarded bayonets, or a harbor of destroyed naval ships that rise unnaturally high in the air. You still have a lot of ghost-like clichés, like the part where you move through a flooded village overrun by toxic waters (actually your level of toxic swamp if it's caused by war crimes), but I was surprised by how many of the areas had character or some sort of compelling component to pique my interest. For example, in one level I was crawling around a ruined city where there were only children who had learned to use their small size to their advantage. Working my way through the demolition while doing my best to curry favor with these creepy crawlies was a neat and memorable part. It definitely stuck with me.

The odd setting of Valor Mortis makes for levels that are rather unique.

Valor Mortis also tries its hand at platforming, and while I expected it to be pretty top-notch given the studio's track record with the Ghostrunner series, unfortunately most of it looks like crap. I got stuck in ledges, fell through environments, walked through things I shouldn't have, and more, all of which really took the wind out of my sails. To their credit, these sections certainly try some interesting things, like a bit where you can make platforms appear from afar using one of your hand powers, and the mid-air grappling and wall-running at work is pretty cool. But considering how incongruous it sounds, it feels like something that's been a little over the top.

I've mentioned a few times that Valor Mortis can feel a bit cheesy at times. Some of that is due to certain game design choices and experiments that don't quite work out, but a larger share of this unpolished feeling is due to the many technical issues that Valor Mortis has. I experienced hard crashes, a recurring issue that would shut down my computer when I tried to launch from Steam, all the environment pieces were completely missing, and tons of other stuff – the pack just has a rather tacked-on feel to it, which sometimes distracted me from my journey through this ruined world.

Valor Mortis is what you get if a truck full of used copies of BioShock hits a GameStop warehouse full of used copies of Dark Souls. The result is something that's refreshingly unique despite taking clear cues from both, though the execution doesn't always prove it. When things work right, this ghost-like genre with a sword in one hand and a fist of fire in the other is about as fun as it sounds, and taking down big, ugly monsters with a cutlass is fun most of the time. But not everything Valor Mortis is trying to do is smooth sailing, with a slew of bugs and technical issues in need of quick patching and a story that's more about feel than substance. Still, there's a lot to love about these unique souls, and I'm still glad I spent over 20 hours in its dark and curious world.