Valor Mortis Review, Napoleon’s Plague Done in First Person

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Valor Mortis puts the Souls formula behind a soldier's eyes, and this Valor Mortis review comes from someone who has been hooked on that idea since launch day. One More Level, the studio behind Ghostrunner, kept the lanterns, the lost currency, and the bosses that flatten you, then built a first-person soulslike around them. It plays faster and feels more personal than most of the genre.

I picked it up one day after it launched on PC and often parry plague-ridden soldiers through an alternate Napoleonic Europe. It came out on October 13, 2026 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. It also landed on Game Pass on day one, so plenty of players will meet it there first.

Below, you'll find my verdict on the combat, the weapons, the bosses, the level design, the story, and how the PC version runs, plus who should buy it and who should wait.

Valor Mortis Review Summary

• Valor Mortis is a first-person soulslike built around parrying, with blocking that costs health and a dash for the attacks you can't deflect.

• The arsenal is small and focused: three blades, three firearms, and three Transmutations, with no armor to chase.

• Progression runs on Catalysts and Ambers, which keeps builds simple and keeps every death about your timing.

• General Lothaire was the hardest wall in my run, and the bosses get fairer once you have a few levels in you.

• Levels loop back on themselves with shortcuts and paths that open later, but there's no map to lean on.

• Vincent Cassel's Napoleon carries a story that stays vague for too long.

• The PC version still stutters and crashes at times after the First Update, though the October 16 fixes helped.

• Buy it if you love soulslikes, or try it on Game Pass. Wait for more patches if you're on PC and short on patience.

Parrying Is The Heart Of Valor Mortis

Every fight in Valor Mortis comes back to the parry. Blocking costs you a sliver of health on each hit, so holding the guard button through a combo slowly kills you. A clean parry breaks an enemy's guard and opens them up for a heavy finisher, so the whole game pushes you toward it. By my second evening, I had stopped blocking almost entirely and started watching shoulders and sword tips the way I would in any good soulslike.

First person makes this feel sharper than I expected. A saber swinging toward your face reads very differently from one swinging at a character on screen, and landing the parry feels like your own reflex rather than an avatar's. Dodging is a short dash, and I save it for the unblockable attacks and the leaping dogs. Stamina is tight, so I can only get a handful of swings in before I'm exposed, and learning when to stop attacking mattered more than any upgrade.

Hit detection lets the illusion slip. A few times I took damage from a swing that looked like it passed well in front of me, and boss sweeps sometimes reach further than the weapon does. A Steam player called Nightingale described a second hit leaking through a held block, and I ran into the same thing against faster enemies. It happens often enough that I stopped trusting the block and leaned even harder on parries. A rally mechanic gives back a little health when you counterattack after taking a hit, and that rewards the aggressive habit.

Every Valor Mortis Weapon Has A Job

The Valor Mortis weapons list is short. You get three blades (Saber, Rapier and Claymore), three firearms (Pistol, Musket and Blunderbuss) and three Transmutations (Fire, Shield and Stasis) that sit in William's left hand. Everyone ends up with the same core kit, and there are no armor or accessory slots to fill. I found that freeing was better, since I spent my time learning moves instead of reading stat sheets.

My Saber stayed in my hand for most of the game. It's quick enough to punish after a parry and forgiving when I mistime one. The Claymore, which turns up late in Chapter 6, hits harder, but its slower swings got me killed against groups, so I kept it for big single targets. The Pistol is the tool I underrated early. Ammo is scarce, though a shot to a weak point staggers an enemy, and the Blunderbuss I found in Chapter 3 became my answer to packed corridors.

Transmutations change fights more than any blade. Fire comes first in Chapter 1, and setting a crowd ablaze before wading in became a habit within the first few hours. Stasis, which arrives in the Chapter 4 caverns, freezes an enemy for a moment, and I use that window for the heavy hits I could never fit in otherwise. Shield turns up much later, in Chapter 8. The downside is depth: each blade has a limited moveset, and by the late chapters I'd seen everything my favorite weapon could do.

Catalysts And Ambers Keep Builds Simple

Catalysts are the currency here, dropped by enemies and spent on levels. Die and your Catalysts stay where you fell, and dying again before you get them back means they're gone. Lanterns work as checkpoints and reset the enemies when you rest. In the story, a Polish craftsman called Lucjan Skawiński marks these safe havens with lamps that never run out of oil.

Each level gives you skill points to spend on stats, abilities, and weapons. Leveling also opens slots for Ambers, perks that tweak one habit at a time. One Amber lets you parry enemy bullets, another makes firearm shots explode on weak points, and others help with blocking or health regeneration. You only get a few slots, so I spent more time deciding what to give up than what to add.

Progression is slow early and noticeably simpler than in most of the genre. I felt underpowered through the first few chapters, and some of that pain comes from levels arriving at a crawl. Crafting opens later and lets you strengthen weapons with rare materials found off the main path, which finally gave my exploring a clear reward. Want deep build theory? You'll run out of decisions fast. If you'd rather your deaths be about timing, that's a plus.

Valor Mortis Bosses Peak With Lothaire

The Valor Mortis bosses open with the worst of them. General Lothaire, the Eagle-Bearer, beats you in the first chapter as part of the story, then waits for a rematch in the second. I died more in that second fight than anywhere else in the game. He hits hard, the fight drags on, and at that stage I had almost no stamina or health to absorb a mistake. Before launch, the studio acknowledged demo feedback that Lothaire was too hard, and he still felt overtuned to me in the full game. Things get noticeably fairer the moment he's gone.

After him, the curve settles. Slaughtermill, at the end of the Crime chapter, is my favorite fight and the point where the parry finally clicked for me. Anna, The Bride Drowned in Tears, opens Chapter 6 and was the fight I remembered longest afterward. A couple of the later bosses went down on my first or second try, which says as much about my levels by then as about their design.

Big fights get a lot out of first person. Seeing a giant swing come straight at the camera makes a clean parry feel huge. One More Level says it widens and narrows the camera's view on the fly so large bosses stay readable. It mostly works, though a few big sweeps still came from outside my view. A handful of bosses felt thin next to the best ones, and I'd rather have had fewer, sharper fights. The ones that land are as good as anything in the genre.

The Levels Loop Like A Metroidvania

Valor Mortis is split into chapters, and each one is a new area: villages at night, a drowned town, plague-infested sewers, woods and caverns. Inside each, paths fold back on themselves. I kept fighting my way down a side route only to kick open a shortcut that dropped me right next to a lantern I'd rested at an hour earlier. That moment never got old.

The structure borrows from Metroidvanias on purpose. Movement tools you pick up along the way open paths you could see but not reach before, and the movement itself mixes wall-running, swinging over gaps, and grappling. Side paths hide grenades, special ammo, and the rare materials you need for crafting. Side quests show up along the way too, and they range from neat stories to errands that ask a lot for a small reward.

There's no map and no compass, so you find your way by landmarks. I liked that in the smaller chapters and hated it in the bigger ones, where I lost real time running in circles. Fast travel only shows up late. The platforming is decent but never as precise as Ghostrunner's, and a few jumps over shrinking platforms cost me more lives than the enemies did.

Vincent Cassel's Napoleon Owns The Story

You play William Dowsett, a young Englishman who volunteered for Napoleon's Grande Armée and wakes up in a battlefield grave. A plague is spreading across Eastern Europe in the wake of the war; it brings the dead back as monsters, and it lets William hear Napoleon inside his head. Vincent Cassel voices Napoleon, who talks to William the way a father talks to a son, and Cassel makes that warmth slightly frightening. Every time he spoke, I paid attention.

Around him, the plot is thinner. The game holds back answers about the plague and about why William came back for a long stretch, and I spent several chapters fighting without a clear sense of why. Partway through, a rebel called The Shrike starts speaking in William's head too, and the two voices pulling at him gave the second half more tension than the first. Most of the context lives in a journal that logs enemies, places, and lore.

My favorite writing sits off the main path, in a side plot about a group of orphans called the Mice, and their story hit me harder than the main mystery. You can also help some characters or lie to them, and those choices change a few outcomes. Full voice acting is in English only, with subtitles in thirteen more languages, and the studio has said it plans a fully voiced French version after launch.

Valor Mortis On PC Needs More Patches

Valor Mortis PC performance is the weakest part of the package. It runs on Unreal Engine 5, and the first boot spent a long time compiling shaders. It does that again the first time you enter each new area, so every fresh chapter opened with a stutter or two before it settled. My RTX 4080 sits above the RTX 4070 the official recommended spec asks for, so these hitches point at the game rather than the hardware.

Inside a fight, the game ran smoothly for me most of the time. DLSS upscaling and frame generation are both in the menu, and the 4080 supports NVIDIA's frame generation, so I could run both. Ray tracing caused the worst stutter I saw, and turning it off made the busiest fights steadier. Crowded village brawls never troubled the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which also clears the recommended CPU tier.

Crashes were the real problem in launch week. I hit a couple of hard crashes to desktop before the First Update, and one after it. The October 16 hotfix, which the studio calls the First Update, fixed some of the most common crashes, added a warning for outdated GPU drivers, and cleared progression blockers in Chapter 4 and Chapter 12. The studio also advised anyone who played the Playtest or demo to delete their old GameUserSettings.ini file, and doing that removed most of my remaining hitches.

Is Valor Mortis Worth Buying Right Now?

Yes, if you love soulslikes. It's the most interesting thing the genre has done with a first-person camera, and the combat alone justified my time. The studio describes it as a 20-hour campaign, and I never felt it was padding itself out.

It was on Game Pass from day one, which is the easiest way to see whether the parry clicks for you. Outside Game Pass, you'll find it on the Xbox Store, the PlayStation Store, or Steam. The Deluxe Edition adds cosmetic weapon skin packs and a major story DLC, a separate side story planned for 2027.

Wait, if you're on PC and stutter ruins a game for you, or if you want New Game Plus, which the studio has planned with carried-over progression and tougher enemies. Wait, too, if you want deep builds, since that side of the game is thin. Everyone else should start now and get past Lothaire before the rest of the internet does.

FAQs About Valor Mortis

Final Words

Valor Mortis nails the parry, and in first person that's the hardest thing to get right. It feels personal in a way third-person soulslikes rarely manage, and every fight I won felt earned. The rough edges sit around that core: a first boss that punishes too hard, a story that hides too long, and a PC version that still needs work.

Support will decide how long it lasts. New Game Plus, the story DLC, and further stability fixes could turn a very good game into a genre staple, and One More Level has already shown it patches quickly. I'll be watching the next update closely, mostly for the crash list.

If you're starting now, learn the parry early and stop treating block as safe. Spend your first Catalysts on stamina, and don't be afraid to leave Lothaire for an hour and come back.

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