When you think of Valhalla, what springs to mind? For me it is the Norse God Odin's hall of great warriors who have fallen in battle. Several games in the past have included references to Valhalla - the PC game Rune had you pursuing evil forces and eventually end up as a favored warrior able to enter Valhalla. More recently, Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth had you helping Odin prepare for Ragnarock by guiding great warriors (Einherjar) to Valhalla. However, Valhalla Knights has little to do with any of that mythology aside from the name - and perhaps that inconsistency should have served as a warning.

I will occasionally drift off in thought while playing games and picture life in the world described by the game. This can be a good thing, such as imagining life in the island city of Khorinis in Gothic II, or a bad thing, as I wonder who is sitting in all of the empty chairs around Arindale in Dungeon Lords. In this case I was thinking about Sartre. To be specific, I was thinking of his play No Exit. The basis of the play is that several people are trapped in a room with no exit, left to deal with nothing but each other. The group eventually realize that they are in hell - and that hell is the other people.

So, what causes me to have these thoughts about Valhalla Knights? IN short, it's the battle system. When you meet up with an enemy on the field, you are tossed into a circular battle ring. You cannot escape the ring unless you defeat the enemies. There are typical tactics you would use in a case like this - if you are a melee fighter then you'd get into the thick of things with the enemy and count on your mages and clerics to aid you with support and ranged firepower. Your 'back line' helpers should also strive to stay out of harm's way as much as possible - but this is difficult when there is no 'line' because the battlefield is a circle. The tie-in to the original thought? At some point in the game you will ask yourself, "what the heck am I doing here and how do I get out?!" That is the easy part - press the 'Home' button, select 'Yes', remove the disk and insert something else... then forget you every played this one.

Let me take a step back and talk a little about the game though, because on paper it is a thing of wonder - a party-based dungeon crawler with near total freedom to craft your own adventurers, enemies you can see and choose to fight or avoid, and so on. The game is a dungeon crawler with plenty of quests and side quests to keep you busy, with a multi-tier class system with plenty of skills to allow very flexible character customization. You can see where this could be great - attach a reasonable scenario (we're not even talking a great story) and a robust battle system and you have the makings of an addictive game that could cost you dozens of hours of your life.

Unfortunately, the implementation of nearly everything that doesn't look good in a screenshot is mediocre. That sounds harsh, but unfortunately it is true. Graphically the game looks really nice - the environments are striking, detailed and begging for exploration, enemies and characters possess a mix of cartoonish features and realistic details, and the menus and text are all crisp and clear. Even better are the effects in battle - they are perhaps not as impressive as some turn-based PSP games, but this is all happening in real-time as you run around evading enemies, making it more impressive. It is better looking than most games on the system, particularly better looking than other action RPGs such as the Untold Legends and Dungeon Siege games. It is bright where it should be bright and dark where it should be dark, and it has details where they best serve the visual focus of the player. But one thing is missing - style. This game could be called Generic Dungeon Game 101 and it wouldn't matter - there is nothing that you will see during the course of the game that will strike you as impressive, which really marks the game as an individual achievement. The sound isn't so bad, but again it lacks personality and anything to make it stand out.

The presentation would easily be forgivable if the game had a story and characters to wrap yourself up in. Unfortunately, the old truism of action RPGs having hackneyed plots is an understatement here. After a brief cut scene and semi-interactive battle that is supposed to set the scene for the game, things begin in earnest. You wake up in an inn and - brace yourself - you have lost your memory. You have a - prepare yourself - non-corporeal voice inside of your head, telling you things and giving you hints. There is an evil force sweeping over the land, headed up by 'the Dark Lord'. I'm not making this stuff up! Anyway, you need to get out of the area you start in so that you can regain your memory and pursue your true destiny.

But even a story as clichéd as that wouldn't be an issue if the gameplay was there to support the experience; after all, dungeon crawls are not known for their deep and engaging stories - they are all about 'tell me why I'm about to kill everything in sight, then get out of my way and let me at it!' Unfortunately, the gameplay is weak and fraught with frustration throughout.

The quest structure is a good place to begin. You are given mandatory quests to complete to advance the plot, and you can also accept missions from the local guild to gain experience gold and items. Here we start immediately with two problems - the quests are monolithically of the mundane fetch/find/kill type and you really have to complete them all in order to gather up enough gold to gain new party members and experience to advance your character to a point where you will survive. One positive thing about the missions is that completing them gives a significant boost in experience compared to battles, something counter to current action RPGs (but very welcome). The downside is that quests are parceled out in a way that has you constantly trudging back and forth. You can't take on a bunch of quests at once, accomplish them all and then get your rewards - you actually have to finish one and return to get the next, at which point another 'magically locked door' becomes accessible. There are occasional teleports that help you cut the drudgery of the trudgery a bit, but you will still find yourself walking for several minutes (and entering battles) just to get back to where you died the last time. This is particularly true with boss fights.

Another big problem is that for a game that touts freedom of character development, there are certainly right and wrong choices to be made. For example, after you start the game, you are dumped on the street with a quest in pocket and have a random discussion that serves as pretty much your only direction for the early part of the game. You have some gold available and you are pointed to the local guild and weapon shop as useful places to visit. What you are not told is "look, if you go alone you'll die regardless of buying items. Go recruit someone - oh, and depending on what character class you chose initially and who you recruit, you might still die." The problem is that the game starts with a single-player focus but immediately switches to party focus when it comes to combat. Many people decide their character class differently based on whether the gameplay is single player or party based. Let me be more direct - you can choose any class you want to start the game, but it should be a combat class. And if you don't recruit a Priest right away then you will end up restarting the game. Furthermore, the game does little to help you out with setting up default combat behavior for your party. That is the bottom line - if you don't make the right choices out of the gate, you are doomed. This feeling of 'make the wrong choice and you're dead' continues throughout the game.

Flexibility in character advancement is offered by allowing you to take on sub-classes. The way this works is that once you've advanced enough in your main class, you can choose a secondary class and take on some of the characteristics of that class. So if you selected a Fighter as a starting class, you could sub-class Priest and effectively become a Paladin. You can still only level your fighter, so it isn't true multi-classing, but it works well enough. Gaining levels through missions or battles allows you to level up your characters. You can directly spend these advancement points, increasing your characters in a limited amount of ways. There is nothing as elaborate as the skill trees found in other action-RPG's, but what you do get is serviceable.

Finally, we return to Sartre's ring. You will spend a lot of time in combat during Valhalla Knights, which is how it should be. You will meet various creature types, with all sorts of weaknesses and strengths and means of ripping your party to shreds. The game is difficult, that much is for sure - and again I think this is a good thing; too often in recent years, games with decent combat systems have been undermined by being mind-numbingly easy (such as the Legend of Heroes games). The system I mentioned earlier that allows you to control the behavior of your allies in battle is based on a spider chart (check your math texts, kiddies) that allows you to add points to the various vertices to influence the likelihood of that ally performing that action. For example, if (when) you recruit a Priest (the first action you should take), you can change their behavior by reallocating every point they have into 'support', so they will constantly cast healing magic spells. Likewise, you can set your mage to cast offensive spells and your thief to use their bow and so on. This is important, because you only control one party member at a time and the rest use the spider chart to determine what to do next. The system works fairly well, but as you might expect, nothing approaches actually controlling the party members yourself. The most egregious example is 'damage avoidance'; let's face it, your mage can't take too much damage, which is why she is parked on the back line tossing fireballs.

The combat system fails for a couple of reasons - the attack system is limited and repetitive, and you are stuck in a ring. You take control of one character and let the rest do their thing. You can change which character you control at any time, which can be useful, because while you can tell your Priest to cast healing spells all the time, there is no setting for "don't just stand there getting whacked while I take out the rest of the mob!" This means that you cannot rely on the other members of your party to stay out of trouble - if you tell them only to cast healing spells then they won't attack enemies, even to save themselves - but if you give them balanced settings they will charge into battle and get killed quickly. This was yet another thing I adjusted to, still looking for the thrill of combat, but there isn't any - your melee fighters get standard and special attacks, you mages get spells and special attacks, and so on. You lock on targets and button mash away, watching the enemy health bars for clues that your attacks are actually hitting.

I know this review comes off harsh, but I was pulling for Valhalla Knights for hour after hour; waiting for that little nugget to appear that I could grab hold of. I love niche games, ones that offer some small special thing, so the thought of getting a niche dungeon crawler was very appealing. But more than anything, these types of games really depend on a highly developed character customization and combat system. The character system seems deep and appealing, but is really fairly limited and what is there is undermined by the lack of true freedom in the game. Combat is a dreadfully boring experience that takes place in real-time in an ill-realized 'ring of death'. As for the rest of the game, the less said the better. This is unfortunately destined to quickly join the pile of poorly executed PSP role-playing games in a crowded bargain bin someplace. To quote Sartre again "Life begins on the other side of despair." I have reached the other side of this game, which is close enough. Now my life can begin again.

Reviewed by Michael Anderson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).