Valfaris: Mecha Therion

I went into Valfaris: Mecha Therion braced for disappointment. Steel Mantis built a devoted following with the original Valfaris, a boot-to-the-face Contra-style run-and-gun dripping in heavy metal iconography, and the idea of swapping all that grounded brutality for an auto-scrolling shoot-em-up felt like a genuine risk. Forty minutes in, I stopped worrying. This is a different kind of game, yes, but it understands what made its predecessor feel alive: the weight, the noise, the sheer joy of destruction given a shape. The shift to a 2.5D horizontal shmup changes the tempo completely. The screen never stops pushing you forward, and the game fills that forward momentum with relentless waves of enemies ranging from Warhammer-esque space marines to genuinely unsettling organic horrors. What keeps it from becoming just another scrolling bullet sponge grind is the combat triangle at its heart: your Destroyer-class ranged weapons run on a power meter that drains as you fire, your melee attacks replenish that energy, and crucially, melee also deflects incoming projectiles. It sounds like a gimmick on paper. In practice it creates a constant rhythmic push-and-pull, where swapping between the Hellhammer, the flamethrower, or the Hellwraith soul-minigun and your sword feels less like resource management and more like conducting something loud and violent. Auxiliary weapons, things like the Electroburst or surface bombs, slot into a third slot and add another layer to the loadout without tipping into overcrowding. Upgrades are funded by Blood Metal earned from kills, so you always want to be in the thick of it, which is exactly the right incentive for a game built around momentum. The presentation is Steel Mantis at their most confident. The 2.5D environments allow the camera to rotate mid-level, suddenly sweeping 45 degrees so a swarm of creatures comes barreling out of a new plane entirely. It is genuinely disorienting the first time and quietly thrilling after that. Former Celtic Frost guitarist Curt Victor Bryant returns on soundtrack duties, and I do not use the word "soundtrack" lightly here: this is a composed, paced, intentional piece of heavy metal work that earns comparisons to the DOOM series' approach of treating music as a weapon. Every new weapon unlock is announced by a burst of guitar. The sound design on each gun is chunky and distinct. The game knows that noise is half the experience. There are real criticisms to make. The genre change cuts the risk-reward system from the original: no more resurrection stones, no tension at checkpoints. Checkpoints here are free, health and power are static, and while the boss fights scale up in challenge on higher difficulties (unlocked in New Game Plus), the standard run feels easier than Valfaris did. Some players in the shmup community have also pointed out the absence of a score system, and while the game explains that absence by leaning into journey-over-score structure, it does remove a layer of replayability that genre purists will notice. Occasionally the screen gets busy enough that incoming damage feels arbitrary rather than earned, a visibility problem that crops up in the most saturated color moments. Upgrades, too, can feel like they create a commitment trap: pour Blood Metal into one weapon early and you will probably stick with it whether it fits the back half or not. None of that kills the experience, though. This is a tight, handcrafted piece of work from a tiny team who knew exactly what they were building. The secret areas reward exploration within the scrolling format, modules like the Bathoryn soul-sword booster or the Heart of Xyla melee amplifier create genuine loadout personality, and the New Game Plus difficulties plus a post-credits challenge mode give completionists a real reason to return. A first run lands somewhere between four and eight hours depending on difficulty and secret-hunting, and the Steam community sits at 94 percent positive at time of writing. For a game that changed genres mid-series, that is not nothing.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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