Valkyrie Elysium has one of the absolute finest combat systems i've seen in a game in a long time. A beautiful insection between the systems of Platinum and Kingdom Hearts, with bountiful options and ways to extend attack chains into this beautifully flowing thing. The sort of thing where you see a new group of enemies in the distance and think "let's go" even if it's the same bunch of mobs you've seen many times before.
It is such a bright, shining centerpiece for the game. Probably the best action game combat in a decade. All the game needs on top of it to be honestly a straight up game of the year is competent mission design, a decent story, and fair production values.
Well, shit.
Just about everything but the combat and visuals in Elysium is a notch below mediocre, and it threatens to ruin the whole damn thing. In so many ways it feels like it's a mid-budget game plucked straight from 2002, where action games like this were yet to work out things like quest design, level design, enemy variety, story structure, pacing, RPG elements...
I hate to say it but just going about the levels in Elysium is misery. The balance between linearity and open levels is as bad as it could possibly be, where it may as well have been liner with how corridor-y it is, but also offers just enough alcoves and off routes to both get lost and to hide trinkets down to waste your time. There's also bafflingly bad detective/tracking sections which require you to follow the slowest butterflies to a location, which you'll have to resummon, which yes has a 7 second unskippable animation, what the fuck? Oh, and you'll need to do some truly painful searching around the maps to find the mcguffins to achieve the true ending.
Well that is, if you care. The story isn't bad so much as barely anything happens, and your objectives for the first 80% of the game are unclear, and the game fails to really bring up consequences and honestly, what the core conflict even really is until really late on. Granted, you can kind of see it all coming anyway. There is some neat twists on norse mythology and stuff buried in here somewhere, and the true ending actually goes hard, but yeah. Not worthwhile.
Also for a war between gods which literally is about the fate of the world, the production is so barebones. There's no sense of scale at basically any point, the cast is tiny (there is legitimately one living human shown) - it's hard to articulate, but the drama it's going for just doesn't really pay off.
But fuck it, it's worth it. The combat is that good. The smorgasboard of dealbreakers just drift away when you're knee deep in some ridiculous aerial combo where you summon 2 dudes, ending with a spell that sets you up for another into a perfect parry launcher-thing.
It's just clear the budget was just not there for basically anything else.
It is such a bright, shining centerpiece for the game. Probably the best action game combat in a decade. All the game needs on top of it to be honestly a straight up game of the year is competent mission design, a decent story, and fair production values.
Well, shit.
Just about everything but the combat and visuals in Elysium is a notch below mediocre, and it threatens to ruin the whole damn thing. In so many ways it feels like it's a mid-budget game plucked straight from 2002, where action games like this were yet to work out things like quest design, level design, enemy variety, story structure, pacing, RPG elements...
I hate to say it but just going about the levels in Elysium is misery. The balance between linearity and open levels is as bad as it could possibly be, where it may as well have been liner with how corridor-y it is, but also offers just enough alcoves and off routes to both get lost and to hide trinkets down to waste your time. There's also bafflingly bad detective/tracking sections which require you to follow the slowest butterflies to a location, which you'll have to resummon, which yes has a 7 second unskippable animation, what the fuck? Oh, and you'll need to do some truly painful searching around the maps to find the mcguffins to achieve the true ending.
Well that is, if you care. The story isn't bad so much as barely anything happens, and your objectives for the first 80% of the game are unclear, and the game fails to really bring up consequences and honestly, what the core conflict even really is until really late on. Granted, you can kind of see it all coming anyway. There is some neat twists on norse mythology and stuff buried in here somewhere, and the true ending actually goes hard, but yeah. Not worthwhile.
Also for a war between gods which literally is about the fate of the world, the production is so barebones. There's no sense of scale at basically any point, the cast is tiny (there is legitimately one living human shown) - it's hard to articulate, but the drama it's going for just doesn't really pay off.
But fuck it, it's worth it. The combat is that good. The smorgasboard of dealbreakers just drift away when you're knee deep in some ridiculous aerial combo where you summon 2 dudes, ending with a spell that sets you up for another into a perfect parry launcher-thing.
It's just clear the budget was just not there for basically anything else.