Valor Mortis Review: Strong Swordplay, Too Many Rough Edges

Valor Mortis is at its most convincing when it takes away your safety net. The rapier can parry but cannot block; the claymore cannot parry at all. Those restrictions give the swordplay a sharper identity than the scripted parkour ever manages.

One More Level, the studio behind Ghostrunner and Ghostrunner 2, has built a first-person Soulslike with parkour elements. Published by Lyrical Games, Valor Mortis releases on October 13, 2026 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, priced at $39.99.

Table of Contents (5)

The parry is the point

Blocking, dodging, parrying, and counterattacking give sword fights a strong rhythm. The first-person viewpoint brings a distinctive intensity to close-quarters encounters, although confined spaces can make enemy attacks harder to read. I welcome the perspective because it changes the feel of familiar mechanics, but obscuring an attack is a poor substitute for making it challenging.

Dual-wielding and firearms expand the arsenal. The blunderbuss has a long reload, while the stasis transmutation freezes enemies. Transmutations draw power from Nephtoglobin. These alternatives give the combat room to breathe beyond repeated sword clashes, without displacing the parry as its strongest attraction.

Weapon variety goes further than build variety. The linear skill tree grants passive bonuses to health, endurance, mana, and parry posture damage. I find the differences between weapons more compelling than that progression: choosing which defensive action to sacrifice carries more personality than another passive increase.

Boss quality is uneven, and the challenge curve becomes less demanding later in the game. That weakens the payoff for learning the combat. A strong parry system needs encounters that keep asking interesting questions of it; Valor Mortis does not sustain that pressure consistently.

Shortcuts beat scripted parkour

The exploration has a better claim on your attention than the movement set pieces. Shortcuts unlock back-routes, and some areas require navigation abilities acquired later. That Metroidvania-style structure gives returning to earlier spaces a purpose rather than treating every route as a corridor to the next fight.

Hourglass-shaped lanterns serve as bonfire equivalents. Dropped currency is called Catalysts and can be recovered by returning to the death location. Opening a shortcut therefore has a practical value: it gives the return journey for those Catalysts a more direct route.

The scripted parkour sequences are frustrating enough to weaken the flow between fights. Ghostrunner’s movement pedigree does not earn them a free pass. I would trade some of that imposed traversal for more encounters that develop the swordplay.

The opening hours are slow, the enemy pool is shallow, and late-game repetition erodes the appeal of the combat. Limited build variety makes that repetition harder to shrug off. A distinctive viewpoint can refresh the genre, but it cannot keep familiar opposition interesting indefinitely.

Napoleonic horror outruns the story

The setting does serious work. This is an alternate-history Napoleonic Europe where Napoleon won at Waterloo and the Crimson Plague turns soldiers and civilians into monsters. William Dowsett, a British-born soldier in Napoleon’s Grande Armée, wakes among battlefield corpses. Body-horror creature designs give that premise a suitably grotesque identity.

Napoleon’s voice inhabits William’s head, with Vincent Cassel voicing him in the English version. The voice acting and flashes of charming writing help, but the story remains predictable and underdeveloped. I rate the atmosphere far above the narrative: the world supplies a compelling reason to explore, while the plot does too little with its historical nightmare.

Technical faults hit the timing where it hurts

On PC, technical problems include stutter when loading areas, frame drops in fire- and water-heavy environments, and a crash. Delayed enemy attack patterns and awkward respawn behavior add more consequential friction. For combat built around reading a cue and answering immediately, those faults interfere with the central appeal.

PlayStation 5 offers Performance and Quality modes, but frame drops and animation clipping remain concerns. I would choose Performance mode for this timing-focused combat. The visual spectacle matters less than keeping a sword exchange readable and responsive.

Technical roughness deserves real weight in the buying decision here. A compromised attack cue can undermine the trust that makes a demanding fight satisfying. Players sensitive to stutters or animation problems should wait rather than purchase at launch.

Bottom line

Day-one Xbox Game Pass availability makes that my preferred route into Valor Mortis. An outright $39.99 purchase makes sense for players who put first-person parries and plague-horror atmosphere ahead of narrative depth and campaign variety. Players buying primarily for storytelling or consistently strong bosses should skip it.

7/10. Valor Mortis earns its recommendation through swordplay, then spends too much of that goodwill on frustrating traversal and technical friction. Buy if the first-person combat is the draw, preferably through Game Pass; wait if reliable timing and polished traversal are non-negotiable.