Sons of Valhalla

I went into Sons of Valhalla hoping the side-scrolling Kingdom formula had finally grown a spine, and the answer is: mostly yes, with some notable asterisks. Pixel Chest, a two-brother studio with obvious love for Viking aesthetics, built a game that sits at the crossroads of 2D base-builder, action-RPG, and lite roguelite. You play as Thorald Olavson, a warrior with a dead father, a kidnapped beloved, and a direct line to Odin himself. The setup is thin, it is essentially a revenge march from left to right across England, but the systems layered on top of that march are more interesting than the premise suggests. The core loop works like this: establish a camp, spend Hack Silver on buildings, recruit fighters from the Barracks, Archery Range, and Siege Workshop, then push forward to the next enemy stronghold. Your Mead Hall tier gates everything, so early decisions about where to invest wood and coin actually matter. Raiders storm the front lines, fire-arrow archers rain down from a distance, and siege engines handle fortifications, there is genuine unit variety, and commanding them with follow, attack, and shield-wall orders adds a tactical layer that the Kingdom games never really had. When you reach the far end of a region, a boss fight strips away the army and turns things into a one-on-one 2D brawl, which is a smart palette-cleanser that tests the personal combat skills you have been leveling separately. That personal combat is the game's most divisive pillar. Thorald swings a sword, blocks, dodges with a stamina bar that evokes Dark Souls-lite muscle memory, throws arrows, eats meat to heal, and drinks mead to refill stamina. The rune belt system, random-rarity upgrades looted from chests and defeated enemies, is the roguelite hook and the best source of build variety. Die and you lose a rune as an offering to Odin before respawning, which creates a genuine cost-benefit tension around risk-taking. However, the base hero combat is sluggish for a long stretch; shrines unlock combo strings, but those are not permanent, leaving you with basic slashes for most of a run. Players who come in expecting Thorald to carry fights solo will find the game frustrating. Players who treat him as a commander who can get his hands dirty, not a one-man army, will click with the pacing much faster. Starting on Easy is not shameful; the game opens up its best decision-making at that difficulty before you add Normal's punishment on top. The honest criticism is that base-building depth is shallower than the building count implies. Mead Hall upgrades unlock plots, lodges generate passive wood and fish, and the five military structures are fairly self-explanatory. Anyone arriving from a true RTS background will find the settlement layer a thin wrapper around the combat. The six-region campaign clocks in around eight to twelve hours depending on difficulty and deaths, and repetition sets in across the back half as the left-to-right structure becomes predictable. A horde mode exists post-campaign for score-chasers, but it does not add strategic complexity, just volume. Community feedback since launch has consistently flagged troop AI, cleaner unit info panels, and a more varied difficulty curve as the main things still wanting attention. For a strategy-curious player who finds grand-strategy titles intimidating, Sons of Valhalla is actually a reasonable gateway drug. The tutorial, structured across an Asgard prologue and a hands-on base-building phase, does the job without condescending. The pixel art is genuinely handsome, the day-night cycle and weather effects give the world a lived-in feel, and the rune system keeps individual runs from feeling identical. The Metacritic score of 73 is an honest read: this is a well-executed mid-range game that does several things with charm and one or two things with frustrating shallowness. Approach it as a breezy Viking action-strategy with roguelite spice, not a base-builder with teeth, and it will deliver a good weekend.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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