Valor of Man - PC (Steam) Review

Valor of Man by developer Legacy Forge and publisher Numskull Games—PC (Steam) review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

Valor of Man, by Legacy Forge and Numskull Games, is a turn-based roguelite RPG where you guide a party of four through ever increasing difficult situations. Achieving victory is never assured and the randomness of the roguelite nature will either be your best friend or your worst enemy.

Valor of Man is certainly an interesting one. Essentially doing away with exploration in the traditional sense, gameplay is split into tiers that each have a series of chapters and nodes that your party will need to cross on their journey which dictates the events that you, the player and the party, experience. Events can be anything from seeing a wondrous sight like a unicorn, to deciding how to handle a situation in a town, and receiving a reward, a gift, a negative condition, or a combination of the above for it. You can also find camp nodes allowing you to heal up conditions received in battle, or through events as mentioned if the potential reward was worth it. Finally, you can fight enemies from small(er) fry to midbosses and chapter bosses. 

Regardless of who you're fighting, the premise is always the same. You need to come out on top or the journey ends. So it’s a good thing that this is where Valor of Man shines. Combat is turn based in which it’s “your” turn and then “their” turn. While your turn and their turn is normal enough, a lot of enemies have reactions that they can take on hit, meaning that if you’re not careful, you could end up taking yourself out in some fights before the enemy’s next turn.

Starting with your turn, each of your four characters have action points that can be used in any order. Starting off with two action points each, you can either move, move twice, move and attack, or attack twice. Other abilities exist in the mix that can be free to use from certain healing abilities to dagger throwing. Extra free movement to close in that distance is also available for that last action point to really matter. The available combinations allow you to approach every situation the way you see fit and allow you to calculate the best courses of action.

Broken down into your typical fantasy party, you have your fighter, healer, ranger and wizard. Being a bit more versatile, each of your characters can have different archetypes. Your fighter can also be a berserker. Your healer is actually a paladin and just as much a force to be reckoned with on the front lines. Your ranger can either dual wield and throw daggers or take to a longer range and shoot from the back lines. Finally, your wizard, they do all the magic from direct spells, to areas of effect and chained linked multi-targets.

Where most planning goes out the window is when the enemies are actually involved. The bigger the enemy, the more options they will have to perform whenever they are hit. Whether it’s to move away, trample through your party, land a shockwave on the ground. This can render a lot of multi-hit attacks useless as once they move away, your characters will not continue their assault.

Where things get really interesting with this roguelite is that while it’s seemingly brutal in the beginning, it’s actually rather forgiving if you know how to use what’s been provided. If one of your characters falls in battle, they’ll receive a condition. This can be anything from less maximum hit points to less evasion or starting action points. These can be healed if you move to target a camp node and choose to remove conditions over enhancing current abilities. As long as there’s one character standing at the end, the journey continues. If a character receives more than three conditions, only then will they be removed from the journey.

To help you come out on top and keep conditions to a minimum, there are a combination of factors that you can leverage. Equipment can be obtained through events or stopping by a merchant. The better the equipment, the higher the price both monetarily and in the potential negative effects along for the ride of the positive ones. You can also obtain artefacts that will affect the entire party. One or more characters could get additional action points, enemies could have a maximum hit rate of 80%, your own evasion could increase, or the really odd ones, every x turns you get a giant spike in an attribute type. Some of the every x turns even carry over from battle to battle, meaning that if it’s something you really want to start with? Make sure you count your turns before moving forward.

Where the actual roguelite elements come into play is that win or lose, you’ll be unlocking something. The further you make it, the more you’ll unlock such as character archetypes and chaos modifiers for another mode. Both positive and negative, these can be applied to a future run. How you target that run, will always be up to you, but regardless of the chosen difficulty of easy1, normal2, hard3, very hard4, each higher tier will naturally be harder meaning that your goals will take much more effort to reach.

1.    Squire Mark: +5 health and +1 strength 
2.    Knight Mark: +10% souls
3.    Champion Mark: +20% souls and enemies have +1 terror
4.    Vanquisher Mark: +30% souls and enemies have +1 terror, +1 strength and +10% spellpower

Finally there’s the overall story which I found interesting as it ties everything together. Without any big spoilers, each run “mechanically” makes sense from a narrative perspective. Each time you die, death brings you back as you have a job to do and as the journey continues forward, your “main” character starts to remember things and changes the course that the party is taking. 

If there’s an issue that I had, other than my luck, so that doesn’t count, it would be in some of the visual presentations. Oftentimes I was losing sight of my party members as a lot of the colours all come together in a mass of people all with the same coloured hit points meters. It would have been nice for your party to have green bars to easily locate them in the sea of red that they will often find themselves surrounded in.

The controls were also a bit odd. I honestly found myself more at home using a controller to navigate everything over the keyboard and mouse. You can also only rotate through your party clockwise, keyboard or controller, meaning that if you want to go back one? Either tab three more times or use the mouse go to and click in that bottom left corner. Abilities were sometimes picky to activate especially “on self” often leading to having to cancel, and then retry to get them to work. 

Overall, I had fun playing Valor of Man as I found it to be a fun time that kept me coming back for more. While it’s not perfect, I was curious about the story and what other party combination types and artefacts could be uncovered to see the results in action both in the regular story mode and the customizable chaos mode. 

Score: 7.75 / 10